[RFC] - Deploy a DeepDAO Pro Dashboard for Uniswap

[Eyal]

Executive Summary

This proposal advocates for the adoption of the DeepDAO Pro Dashboard to enhance Uniswap DAO’s governance processes. DeepDAO Pro provides actionable insights to address key challenges, ranging from financial sustainability, improving capture resistance, and facilitating alignment between key entities.

Key features include:

• Treasury Insights: Monitor asset trends, compare diversification strategies, and understand how governance impacts the treasury.
• Decentralization Metrics: Analyze coalitions and influence to ensure fair decision making and transparent processes.
• Voter Engagement Tools: Identify and re-engage voter segments to boost participation and reduce churn.

We propose a six-month pilot program for $25,000 to evaluate the dashboard’s effectiveness in empowering data-driven decision-making at Uniswap DAO.

Problem Statement

Governance is inherently complex, with multiple stakeholders, changing priorities, and a rapidly evolving ecosystem. Though it is hard to admit, the decision-making process in a DAO is biased by the ‘stronger’ participants. Many important discussions may not occur if those affected lack a strong voice in the DAO.

At the moment, all DAOs are largely dependent on the manual identification of sub-optimal situations. Many critical discussions might never occur if the data pointing to the inefficiency is not readily available, or if the ‘stronger’ participants are not incentive-aligned to facilitate the discussion. Without the presence of objective data, the DAO loses perhaps its only trustable spokesperson.

Hence, it is critical for a DAO to have comprehensive insights on the treasury, token, participation, and related metrics. Through this proposal, we’ll highlight how DeepDAO Pro can address these issues.

How can DeepDAO Pro Help?

DeepDAO Pro is a tool designed to supply DAOs with actionable and comprehensive analytics.

It enables DAOs to move from a model where decision-making is only dependent on manual identification of sub-optimal situations, to an environment that can ‘automatically detect’ these. A few use cases are highlighted below:

Accelerate Uniswap’s Treasury Diversification and Sustainability

Effective treasury management is critical for the long-term sustainability of Uniswap. DeepDAO Pro can help Uniswap compare treasury diversification strategies with the rest of the ecosystem, as well as monitor all of the DAO’s assets and their performance in a single location. DeepDAO Pro can also surface more nuanced insights, for example on how a particular initiative or governance change affects revenue and token price, thereby aiding continuous optimization.

Looking at the two images below, we understand the massive difference in treasury diversification between ENS DAO and GitcoinDAO. This will enable participants in either DAOs to structure their discussion more easily.

(ENS: treasury diversification over time)

(Gitcoin: treasury diversification over time)

Significantly Improve Uniswap’s Decentralization and Resilience

DeepDAO Pro tracks several metrics aimed at improving a DAO’s decentralization. Coalitions is one such metric unique to DeepDAO Pro.

Similar to how liquid staking derivatives are actively monitored in Ethereum (1, 2) to ensure they do not exceed consensus thresholds and cause cartelization, it is equally important for a DAO of Uniswap’s significance to actively monitor the formation of overly powerful governance groups, i.e, coalitions with superpowers. Coalitions are groups of addresses that often vote together on proposals. They surface the interconnections between delegates, how often they vote together, and their collective governance influence. This forum post explains the most powerful coalitions within the Optimism Collective.

Our work on understanding network effects like coalitions highlight the edge we have over other DAO aggregators. The image below demonstrates coalitions DeepDAO Pro identified for the OP Collective.

Increase Governance Participation in Uniswap by Identifying Missing, and Potential Voters

DeepDAO Pro segments voters into:

• Loyal Voters: Consistent participants across governance cycles.
• Missing Voters: Past voters, who haven’t voted in the last 12 months.
• Non-participating Holders: Token holders who’ve never engaged in governance.

Using these insights, Uniswap can devise strategies to:

• Reach out to specific voter groups and re-engage them.
• Reduce voter churn by addressing gaps in participation.
• Strengthen governance, and increase incentives for token holding, by building pathways for new participants to contribute.

Insights on voter interests from ENS DAO’s dashboard:

Reveal the connections between governance activity and treasury growth

In 2024, 47 proposals went to an offchain vote and 20 proposals went to an onchain vote at Uniswap. These proposals fall into a broad spectrum of topics from protocol deployment, to delegate incentives, to arbitrary funding requests, to security-related improvements. Given the amount of activity, it might be beneficial for Uniswap to understand how different proposal categories affected the UNI token price, and total treasury value. Similarly, how has total votes, and number of unique votes, varied across proposal categories? If certain categories invoke less governance participation, how can Uniswap involve more participants in these areas?

Uniswap will be prompted to have these discussions by DeepDAO Pro. The specific data points mentioned above are highlighted through our analysis of token price vs average votes and voter interest categories.

Approach to analysis

DeepDAO Pro can currently aggregate and display comprehensive data on Uniswap’s:

• Treasury, including trends over time, tokens, assets and composition (governance token vs. stables, majors, and others).

• Token, including graphs for four governance metrics as they correlate to the governance token price.

• Voter Trends: multiple metrics of quality and intensity of governance participation in the DAO. Successful proposals, avg. votes per proposal, and others, in multiple timeframes. We also categorize voters based on their governance score to understand participant quality.

• Delegation, including intensity, and quantity of involvement across voting power, delegators, total votes, and voting periods. Sorting by number of recent votes is available. Finding, and displaying metrics on delegate involvement in specific proposals, and proposal types is a simple extension of these existing data points.

• Coalitions, tracking governance activity of power groups of up to 6 addresses. Together with Delegation, this provides deep analysis of decentralization within governance.

• Governance Trends, monitoring voter activity over time, including voter segmentation by participation, loyalty, and absenteeism.

• Proposals, tracking all DAO proposals across different voting systems, their metadata, outcome, and tallies of their votes for, against, or other.

• Ecosystem Mapping, comparing how Uniswap fits within the broader ecosystem, identifying voter overlaps, interests, and potential competition.

• Executive Summary: DeepDAO Pro’s provides a dedicated dashboard to serve as an executive summary, with 7 key metrics for a daily understanding of the DAO’s recent activity, and its position vs. others in the ecosystem.

Conclusion: Next Steps & Asks

In summary, DeepDAO Pro can aid Uniswap on a broad range of topics. We are interested in hearing from you on your appetite to use DeepDAO Pro to aid your participation at Uniswap. Depending on community sentiment, we are keen to take this proposal forward with a $25,000 ask for a 6 month long pilot program. During the pilot phase, our research team will publish analysis on the forum, on insights surfaced by DeepDAO Pro. This will cover gaps on treasury management, voter participation, first and second order effects of governance, identifying a dealing with coalitions, etc. At the end of the 6 month period, Uniswap will be able to evaluate the tool’s impact comprehensively.

DeepDAO has been improving Uniswap’s governance transparency for over 3 years for free. This is a great opportunity for Uniswap to recognise the team’s commitment, and empower us to create more impact within the DAO. Looking forward to your inputs!

Links:
DeepDAO
DeepDAO Pro showcase for ENS

[drllau_LexDAO]

Given the current discussions on procurement and that treasury is still not yet stood up, do you think this can be deferred? If the future treasury whatzits decides to source information, then deciding WHAT needs to decided before opening up to HOW.

Or is there solid reasons for urgency?

PS rather than a list, perhaps (applying the principle of separation of concerns) you can nominate:
a) the underlying datasets and their traits (eg quality/fact checking eg AI or not)
b) proposed APIs / IPIs (internet programming interfaces suited for oracles)
c) optional visualisation HCI for non-AIs

[Avantgarde]

Thank you @Eyal and the DeepDAO team for this proposal.

Generally speaking we’re very much for incorporating more data into the DAO’s decision making as it’s something we feel hasn’t been done enough in the past (goes for most DAOs). But to be completely honest with you, I feel many of the variables you cite are too high level or “basic” to bring meaningful impact, but keen to hear more and be proven wrong. Agree that a pilot program would be a good first step if the DAO wishes to pursue this.

Some thoughts and questions below:

• The treasury is already easily viewable on Etherscan, and any future manager(s) would provide clear reporting, so don’t see the value in the treasury stats.
• What are the “four governance metrics” with correlative data to the token price? This could be a useful tool but I fear the metrics will be too simple/high-level to actually act on, if that makes sense.
• The coalition data is interesting from a research perspective but I wonder how any actions could be deduced from it? Naturally delegates will liaise and align on proposals before taking it to a vote, so these coalitions are bound to show up, but what insight do you think could be drawn from this other than that having a broader set of roughly equally-weighted delegates would be “better”?
• I can see the delegate stats/gov trends being potentially useful for the delegate program (@Doo_StableLab @PGov @AranaDigital would be better positioned to comment on this), but not enough to justify the whole “package” imo.
• Would you be able to elaborate in more detail on the Ecosystem Mapping please? What sort of data are we talking about and how could we apply that data to draw actionable insights?

[Eyal]

Thanks @Avantgarde for your comments.

@Avantgarde

I feel many of the variables you cite are too high level or “basic” to bring meaningful impact, but keen to hear more and be proven wrong

Some insights in DeepDAO pro may be high level, while others are as granular as you get in the ecosystem. I believe both are important, as our Pro version gives you the full picture of what is happening in the DAO in terms of treasury, invested assets, token, and governance. This is important for getting 50k+ delegates, and many other stakeholders on the same page, and I agree with you that this data is not incorporate enough in decision making for many DAOs.

Overall I recommend looking at Pro in action, and not just at the RFC here. For example ENS on DeepDAO - browse the tabs, they are packed with information.

@Avantgarde

The treasury is already easily viewable on Etherscan, and any future manager(s) would provide clear reporting, so don’t see the value in the treasury stats.

While this is true, DeepDAO aggregates the different treasury addresses into one easily viewed table, and also provides a breakdown of the DeFi protocols this treasury is involved with, and a breakdown of its diversifying effort over time. Also, to reiterate, there is value in having a full dataset in one place, and not scattered between several providers.

@Avantgarde

What are the “four governance metrics” with correlative data to the token price?

Votes, voters, proposals, successful proposals, and avg. votes per proposal.

@Avantgarde

The coalition data is interesting from a research perspective but I wonder how any actions could be deduced from it? Naturally delegates will liaise and align on proposals before taking it to a vote, so these coalitions are bound to show up

These coalitions are absolutely a natural phenomenon of people voting together, in DAOs and otherwise. The thing is, they usually go under the radar and nobody knows they exist. With our Coalitions dashboard, you can see them clearly, and understand the power groups within your DAO. This will improve the quality of discussion, and will let DAO stakeholders understand the different interest groups.

In addition, this information is potentially used for watching for a future governance attack. If you observe several meaningful delegates suddenly voting together, whereas previously they did not, the DAO should probably see who they are, and what are they’re interests and motivations.

@Avantgarde

Would you be able to elaborate in more detail on the Ecosystem Mapping please? What sort of data are we talking about and how could we apply that data to draw actionable insights?

This data is primarily for the DAO marketing efforts. The DAO will be able to do the following:

1. Understand the interests of your voters, and token holders, beyond their own DAOs. For example if your voters, or token holders are interested in DeFi, DeSci, and Media DAOs, you can build a marketing angle that takes these into account.
2. Competitors breakdown: Find out which DAOs compete with your own DAO on attention in terms of participating in governance.
3. Target several key groups within your voting body:
4. Loyal voters: voters who voted at least once in the past 3 years. You may want to reward them.
5. Target a group of missing voters: those who voted previously, but not yet in the past 12 months.
6. Missing token holders: addresses that hold the DAO token, but aren’t involved in governance.

To wrap this up, I believe that with DAOs becoming more professional over the past several years, it’s time to have a dedicated dashboard with multiple data dimensions available to all stakeholders. This is what we built with our Pro version.

[drllau_LexDAO]

@Eyal , you go into great details about WHAT you want to do … but the unanswered question is WHY NOW?

After attending the treasury working group review hosted by @karpatkey, it is likely they’d be going down a path of diversification, including IPS growth which includes stakes in other protocols, portfolios, or early product dev. Regulation, supervision and audit of these “investment managers” for their fiduciary duties will probably demand much more intrusive forensics to support Proof of Reserve that the treasury can sustain UF cash outflows without deflating the UNI token (if insufficient growth).

So why punt $25K NOW when the specs for treasury management and auditing haven’t been contemplated.

[Eyal]

Thanks @drllau_LexDAO. Like mentioned above, DeepDAO Pro provides actionable insights to address key challenges, ranging from financial sustainability, improving capture resistance, and facilitating alignment between key entities.

Note that we do not manage financials, we follow what the DAO does, and our product goes far beyond a simple view of the treasury. The idea is to have one place with a broad, and deep dataset that covers many different aspects of DAO management. Look at the executive summary screen of a Pro DAO on https://deepdao.io and see several key insights, and there are many more in the various tabs.

[karpatkey]

We agree that increasing transparency and leveraging more data-driven insights are valuable for the Uniswap DAO. This aligns with recent discussions within the delegates group on Telegram, where various members have proposed ideas to improve transparency and data accessibility for decision-making.

This dashboard seems like a promising tool, particularly in providing deeper insights into decentralization metrics and voter engagement, that are currently not available. Understanding voting patterns and coalition dynamics could help ensure a more representative and effective governance process.