Making Protocol Fees Operational

Thanks for writing this up! It’s an exciting proposal.

I think this proposal is a nice iteration in several ways over the one that @guil-lambert and I wrote up. However, I am going to focus on where I’d like to see continued work before I would support it.

I believe this proposal shares the same weakness that the proposal Guillaume and I had… it does not address what to do with any fees collected.

I’ve come to the strong belief that any fees collected by the protocol should be autonomously distributed in a programmatic way. There is a big design space in what that could look like but the main point is that they should not simply collect to a treasury where they are then arbitrarily distributed based on later token votes. My reasons for this belief are the following:

  1. Token holders have a very poor track record in managing protocol treasuries via discrete voting. It has not proven to be efficient or effective.

  2. Ideologically, this is much more aligned with traditional crypto ethos of immutable, forever software. Contra some other commenters, I strongly disagree with the view that the Uniswap protocol is a business… it absolutely is not a business. It is an autonomous piece of software, it doesn’t have employees, it can’t go bankrupt, it doesn’t have revenue and expenses. Protocols are a revolutionary new entity type and we need to think of them as such.

  3. Although we would still need to be thoughtful about regulatory and tax considerations, the autonomous redistribution should be a much more vanilla tax / regulatory position (i.e. this is the same as how ETH staking works).

I think this proposal is a step in the right direction but the crucial piece I outlined above needs to be addressed before I can support it.

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