Hey everyone,
Figue here. I’m glad to see the lively discussions on the forums.
I’d like to dedicate my first post to the timeline of decision-making - Uniswap’s governance main problem in my opinion - and how the liquidity incentives debates have illustrated this problem.
In military warfare, strategy and tactics go hand in hand. While strategy represents long term planning and goal oriented, tactics is more operational and short term. Basically you set up a strategy and create tactics in order to reach the goals set in stone by the strategy.
In our case, Sushiswap’s vampire attacks are tactics, so are liquidity incentives. On the other hand, grant programs, acquiring news users, reducing slippage on a pair are all strategies as they help the ecosystem stabilize & grow.
This is where I believe we are wrong: current on-chain governance is viable for setting up strategies but isn’t enough flexible to be tactical. Case in point: the current liquidity incentives debacle.
So how do other protocols manage short term events if they have on-chain governance? The way I see it, there are two solutions in place :
- The team keeps a handle on decision-making to allow some flexibility or plays a very active role in the governance (ie : Aave).
- The team elects a council that manages day to day operations and decides via a DAO long term goals / decisions. Sushi is an interesting variant as the core team is in charge of tactics and the governance via snapshot decides the rest.
How does Uniswap compare to all of this?
Well, not good… yet. The team chose (probably for legal reasons) to step back, letting us to be in charge.
But we have no long-term goals truly set in stone, no idea what the team is preparing for v3 and absolutely no tools to fight against short term strategies wielded by competitors. What’s worst is that decision-making is in the hands of 400 votes, with only 4 addresses being able to create a formal proposal.
In short: voter apathy, too much concentration and a team that decentralized too fast and too partially.
Right now, Uniswap is like a stone colossus.
What should we do then?
If silence is consent, I think the core team is prepping up for different governance style with v3 release. In the meantime I strongly believe we should elect a council in charge of clearly defined tactical actions (ie : weekly pair incentives, grant budgeting, etc…).
We could poll for community consent with a 24h snapshot before each decision in order to avoid deviating from the community’s belief.
As always any opinions are welcome; the idea is to create a solution to our incapacity to react on the short term that we can submit as a temperature check.
Cheers
Full disclosure : I work for constellation.finance, a governance venture opening a UNI delegation soon
This whole “Let’s be scared of the government” approach will bite them in the ass.