[Report] The State of Uniswap Governance

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Wanted to point everyone here in the direction of a new report we at Other Internet just published.

It’s called The State of Uniswap Governance: A Paradox of Minimization

Here’s an abstract:

Other Internet embarked on a listening tour with a diverse set of Uniswap stakeholders during the first quarter of 2022. Our aim was to identify the most pressing issue areas within the Uniswap community and provide ideas to improve protocol governance. The “paradox of minimization” is a thread that ran through almost all our conversations: how can we think about increasing governance participation when Uniswap’s governance surface area has been quite purposefully constrained? With so few affordances for taking action on the protocol itself, community energy has gravitated towards web3’s ecosystem-wide issues like L2 scaling solutions and mechanisms for multi-chain governance. But in order for projects in this domain to be successful, Uniswap governance needs more off-chain organizational structures and processes to facilitate coordination across the complex web of stakeholders. We explore the multidimensional nature of this problem and propose potential pathways forward.

The main recommendations we make to the governance community:

  • Formalize off-chain processes and mechanisms for those aspects of governance that cannot be fully automated. As we’ve alluded to in other posts in this forum, despite the ‘minimized’ nature of Uni governance, there are numerous jobs that, despite existing outside governance’s traditional purview, are nonetheless vital for Uniswap’s success to assign owners to.
  • Create many centers of authority that can act independently from the core team. Similarly, in order for this work to happen in a decentralized way, there needs to be additional centers of authority that can meaningfully catalyze work. Better incentives for delegates and additional grant-making bodies are two improvements that could create more surface area for forward progress.

To put our money where our mouth is, we’ve collected a variety of high-priority governance ‘interventions’ that anyone with the right motivation could pick up and be the torch bearer for.

View our table of governance interventions

Hope this report can kick of some interesting conversations about how to improve governance.

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Good stuff! I think it represents a good overview of what we are dealing with.

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It is pretty informative reading this report. It contains an excellent overview which a beginner should understand about Uniswap governance.

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Informative and insightful read. Thanks for that!

I have some comments about a couple of points in the “table of interventions”.

Reimburse gas fees for voting and delegation

  • uni.vote (sponsored by UGP) enables that already, though I guess it’ll be good to have a plurality of a “backup” plan ready to go in case uni.vote for whatever reason stops providing such a service.

Allow protocol fees to be sent to arbitrary addresses … instead of tokenholders

  • As it stands, AFAIK, a cut of the swap fees (if fee switch is enabled) is already meant to be sent to an “arbitrary” (changeable by Governance) address (default would be Community Treasury timelock address), and does not automatically go to “tokenholders”. Hence, I think this row in the table needs to be rewritten and rephrased appropriately…

yj

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Good stuff!It is pretty informative reading this report

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