Hello Uniswap Community! A few weeks ago, we finalized and published our research report that gathered together opinions from around the community on how the governance process can be improved. The final report can be found here: “A Deep Dive of Uniswap’s Governance”
This post will propose some general recommendations to the community and Uniswap Foundation team to possibly look at implementing in the future.
Our Suggestions
Increasing Forum Efficiency: This was a large part of many people’s concerns. Discussions on voter apathy often arose. In order to reduce frictions, we recommend:
- Changing temp/consensus to just one vote: This luckily is already going to be a thing of the past! A recent vote to change the temp/consensus check logistics helps decrease voter apathy and should streamline the process going forward.
- Representative who message known delegates when important discussions and new proposals are live: Other protocols/ecosystems, like dYdX, do this pretty well. A team member will set up a communication channel with all the major delegates and inform them of all the important communications and votes in the protocol.
Increasing Voter Accountability: Another very common concern was the lack of accountability for delegates. In its current state, there’s no disincentive for anyone to not vote on anything and just be idle. We suggest introducing some new delegation changes and some more analytics to clearly compare delegates:
- Have a delegates page where people can delegate to using a native and easy to understand front end.
- Delegate page should show active delegates as determined by predefined participation and communication metrics.
- Possibly consider expiring contracts. Delegators have to redelegate every year or so, which ensures they’re up to speed with the delegates and to give them a chance to reevaluate their delegation.
- Native portal should be able to track which delegates have how many votes and other summary statistics.
Specialize the Role of each Delegate: All the delegates we interviewed were from multiple different stakeholder groups. Each group has their own unique specialties and they should be highlighted in the governance process.
- Delegates should have tags that distinguish their main attributes for delegators to see such as “LP,” “Developer,” or “Trader.” Each group should be expected to be a subject matter expert in their category and provide opinions on proposals in their respective realms.
Incentives for Delegates: This came up the most out of everyone and is something definitely worth exploring. At its core, delegates have a lot going on and to get them to spend more time with Uniswap, some financial incentives would be nice. A few ways of approaching this can be:
- MakerDAO Model: Keep track of delegates’ participation and communication. Those that meet a certain activity rate are eligible for compensation that is prorated based on the amount of delegation they have.
- Optimism Working Group Model: Segment delegates into subject matter expertise. These delegates are expected to contribute to all discussions relating to this topic and recommendations on ways to vote and risks to consider.
- Bounty Model: Allocate a pool for successful proposals and predefined bounties that pass governance
Overall, this is a pretty tricky topic, but we recommend allocating a small pool and to start trying different ways of incentivising delegates, maybe even doing a combo of options.
All in all, the past few months interviewing different stakeholders in the Uniswap ecosystem has been a great time. We’ve learned a lot and believe some tangible recommendations came out of the research that we can implement to better the efficiency and participation of governance!