Revocation of Uniswap Growth's Discretionary Budget for Co-Incentive Campaigns

[pepo]

Authors: @pepo

Date: April 18, 2025​

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Summary

This proposal seeks to revoke the discretionary authority granted to the Uniswap Growth to allocate surplus funds for co-incentive campaigns, as outlined in the RFC: Discretionary Budget from UAC for Co-Incentive Campaigns. The rationale for this revocation is the lack of transparency, absence of official campaign launches, and failure to provide timely updates, which collectively undermine the urgency and trust that justified the original approval.​

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Background

In December 2024, the Uniswap Growth Initiative was granted discretionary authority to deploy up to $250,000 per campaign from surplus UNI funds for time-sensitive co-incentive opportunities, such as a proposed partnership with EtherFi. This initiative aimed to expedite campaign execution by reducing the standard governance process duration from approximately four weeks to a few days. The approval was contingent upon commitments to transparency, including prompt reporting and DAO notifications.​

However, as of April 2025, there have been no official announcements regarding the launch of such campaigns, nor have there been updates or reports detailing any discretionary spending. This lack of communication raises concerns about the actual urgency of the initiatives and the adherence to the promised transparency.​

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Rationale

1. Lack of Transparency and Reporting: The Uniswap Growth Initiative committed to reporting the details of any discretionary spending on the forums upon execution to ensure transparency and accountability. To date, there have been no such reports or updates, indicating a failure to uphold this commitment.
2. Absence of Official Campaign Launches: Despite the urgency cited in the original proposal, there have been no official announcements or evidence of launched co-incentive campaigns utilizing the discretionary budget. This discrepancy questions the necessity of expedited processes and discretionary authority.
3. Erosion of Trust and Governance Standards: The deviation from promised transparency and the lack of action undermine the trust placed in the Uniswap Growth Initiative and set a concerning precedent for governance standards within the Uniswap DAO.

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Proposal

We propose the immediate revocation of the Uniswap Growth Initiative’s discretionary authority to allocate surplus funds for co-incentive campaigns. Future funding requests for such campaigns should undergo the standard governance process, including Requests for Comment (RFC), Snapshot voting, and on-chain proposals, to ensure proper oversight and community involvement.

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Next Steps

• RFC Period: Open for community feedback for 7 days.​
• Snapshot Vote: Pending community feedback, initiate a Snapshot vote to formalize the revocation.
• On-Chain Proposal: If the Snapshot vote passes, proceed with an on-chain proposal to enforce the revocation.​

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Conclusion

The discretionary budget was granted to the Uniswap Growth Initiative under the premise of urgency and with the expectation of transparency. The absence of action and communication since its approval indicates that these conditions have not been met. Revoking this authority will reinforce governance standards and ensure that future initiatives undergo appropriate scrutiny and community engagement.

[AbdullahUmar]

Hey Pepo, the discretionary budget has not been utilized since it has been instated. It’s also governed by the UAC, not the growth program. The UAC has received a couple of deals from growth program partners in the last few months, but all of them have been internally vetoed since passing them requires a unanimous internal UAC vote. That barrier has failed to be crossed so far. In the event that one of these discretionary campaigns passes, we will let the DAO know. The lack of comms around the discretionary budget is more the case because there was not an announcement to be made. We covered this in the last community call:

Further, the budget cannot cannot be used unless a certain surplus threshold is met. This is not presently the case due to UNI token falling in price.

@AbdullahUmar

The impetus for this proposal was a last-minute campaign that the EtherFi team was running near the tail end of the Holidays. Unfortunately, this never fully transpired since the DAO was slightly late to the commitment regardless of the prompt discretionary proposal. As of April 2025, the surplus is not large enough to activate discretionary funding, however, there may be a future scenario where this will come in handy.

As a final point, any other team can also approach us with a high impact deal if they would like, which can include the growth program, UEII, UF, UTWG, Oku, etc. These are often scenarios where public discourse may be too slow (or require short-term discretion), but the potential benefit of being agile/working in private outweighs the cost of going through a 4 week gov process.

If there are other aspects around transparency you would like to see, please let us know.

[Userisky]

The “RFC: Discretionary Budget from UAC for Co-Incentive Campaigns” approval should be revoked. It’s already difficult to keep track of all the various passed proposals with allocated UNI. Having a vague “maybe we’ll do this in the future once conditions are better” approach is unprofessional, leads to a lack of oversight, and creates confusion about what’s actually happening (as highlighted in Pepo’s post). It opens the door for a small group to dictate how excess funds are used at some arbitrary future time. This sets a bad precedent. All unused UNI should be returned to the DAO in the event of a surplus, not recycled into miscellaneous objectives.

Additionally, Alpha Growth already has a passed proposal, is running a podcast, and is leading other initiatives. Alpha Growth can now demonstrate and update the DAO on its potential value. There is no need to piggyback off the UAC’s excess funds.

https://gov.uniswap.org/t/rfc-uniswap-growth-program-trial/24703