RFC - Onboarding Ekubo, Inc. as a core developer of Uniswap Protocol

Requests for Comment
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Summary

Ekubo Protocol is an AMM on Starknet with a singleton design, super-concentrated liquidity and support for extensions. The implementation is written in the Cairo language to take full advantage of Starknet’s architecture, but re-uses much of the same design philosophy as Uniswap V4. Ekubo’s design is the most advanced of any AMM in production. In its first month, Ekubo won approximately 75% of total volume traded on Starknet with only 5% of the TVL.

Ekubo proposes a partnership with the Uniswap DAO in the form of a 3 million UNI (~$12MM) contribution in exchange for a 20% share of a future Ekubo protocol governance token. As a result, the Uniswap DAO becomes a significant stakeholder in Ekubo protocol and vice versa. This alignment enables the development teams of Uniswap and Ekubo to collaborate. We at Ekubo, Inc. believe this is a vitally important step in the decentralization of Uniswap protocol development, effectively onboarding the Ekubo team as core developers.

Background

My name is Moody Salem (Twitter, GitHub), and I am the founder of Ekubo, Inc., the company developing Ekubo Protocol. Before starting the company, I was an engineer lead on the Uniswap team. I joined the Uniswap Labs team in April 2020 as the 5th employee. As an engineer at Uniswap, I wrote much of the early Uniswap interface, created token lists, wrote the first swap routing algorithm for V2 and V3, committed about half of the V3 code, and finally led the design of V4.

In May 2022 I became an Advisor to Uniswap Labs and 1 year later I left the advisor role. I began working on an AMM for Starknet because I believe in Starkware’s technical vision: a ZK rollup optimized for throughput rather than EVM compatibility. I deployed the first version of Ekubo protocol 3 months after starting work on it. Since AVNU’s integration on September 14th and Fibrous’s integration shortly after, Ekubo has facilitated the majority of volume traded on Starknet entirely through the aggregators. Ekubo, Inc. has also partnered with the largest wallet on Starknet, Argent, in order to bring capital efficient market making to more users.

We believe Starknet with its rapidly improving programming language and infrastructure will soon be one of the most active L2s on Ethereum. Because it does not focus on compatibility with the EVM, it includes innovations such as account abstraction and, soon, volition that have the potential to greatly improve the UX of interacting with the blockchain and simplify onboarding for the next wave of users. If Starkware delivers on their vision, UNI holders need to have a stake in this market.

Budget

The purpose of the 3 million UNI is to continue the operation of Ekubo, Inc. for development of Ekubo protocol as well as contribution to Uniswap protocol. The expenses include primarily engineering, audits, and legal support.

We believe this amount of UNI gives Ekubo the runway to grow Ekubo protocol into a sustainable product. Much of the work will be to deliver public goods to the Starknet ecosystem, including standard token, governance, and incentives contracts written in Cairo, all of which are necessary to scale Starknet to the same level of usage as competing L2s.

Because this is an investment of liquid tokens, the UNI will be spent at the discretion of the CEO of Ekubo, Inc. for operations, research and development, with the mission of organically growing Ekubo protocol usage and revenue to sustain ongoing development. We will deliver biannual reports of our progress to the Uniswap community via the forum.

Technical details

In order to fractionalize ownership of the protocol, we will deploy a set of governance contracts on Starknet including a token representing voting rights on Ekubo protocol within 1 month of this proposal passing. The Uniswap DAO will receive 20% of this token, which it can delegate or redistribute however it decides. The remaining 80% will be controlled by Ekubo, Inc. Any further distribution of the 80% of tokens held by the company will be determined on a future date solely by Ekubo, Inc.

As with Ekubo protocol, the token will be native to the Starknet L2. We will create a proxy on Starknet to hold the tokens on behalf of the Uniswap DAO to be transferred or delegated as the DAO pleases.

Sharing of intellectual property

The proposal will also update the Uniswap V4 license to include a grant to Ekubo, Inc. for unlimited use on the Starknet network. This grant mitigates any issues pertaining to the sharing of code between Ekubo, Inc. and the Uniswap community. Ekubo, Inc. employees will also sign a standard contributor license agreement before contributing to the Uniswap V4 protocol.

Links

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After my first read through I came away positive from this proposal. Expanding the team to another ecosystem and Cairo language specialisation makes sense. It mitigates the risks of a Uniswap rewrite in Cairo.

I do have a few clarifying compound questions:

Is this proposal indicating that Uniswap would not launch on Starknet? How is it beneficial to the Uniswap v4 ecosystem by funding developers for a similar product on an alternative L2? Could Uniswap not just launch on Starknet in the future? Would Uniswap launching on Starknet cause an alignment issue, i.e. how would Ekubo and Uniswap cohabitate on Starknet?

Does Ekubo plan on being Starknet centric or move to other L2 chains, such as Optimism, and Arbitrum?

How is the valuation of $12 million for 20% of the company derived? That would put the project at around $60 million FDV? Do the current metrics, volume, users, transactions etc justify this? Is this comparable to similar seed round raises in the current climate for a new project <7 months old?

Would it make more sense to have the UNI tokens tied to milestones from Ekubo over a 3-5 year period?

Does Ekubo’s extension architecture fit with hooks? Would these Ekubo extensions be able to be used as Uniswap Hooks on other chains? Is this covered in the standard contributor license agreement?

Looking forward to seeing how this proposal develops

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Thank you for your comments and questions.

Is this proposal indicating that Uniswap would not launch on Starknet?

We don’t know of any plans by the foundation or Uniswap Labs to build an AMM on Starknet.

How is it beneficial to the Uniswap v4 ecosystem by funding developers for a similar product on an alternative L2?

Our AMM contains significant improvements that would also be applicable to Uniswap V3 and Uniswap V4. We would contribute the same improvements to Uniswap V4 if this proposal passes, as well as any future improvements. We have also pioneered a protocol withdrawal fee, which provides valuable data to the Uniswap community.

These benefits are in addition to the Ekubo tokens, which the DAO can use to grow the Uniswap ecosystem however it sees fit.

Could Uniswap not just launch on Starknet in the future? Would Uniswap launching on Starknet cause an alignment issue, i.e. how would Ekubo and Uniswap cohabitate on Starknet?

When we say Uniswap, it’s important to distinguish between the DAO, the foundation, and the company Uniswap Labs. If you are referring to Labs building its own AMM on Starknet, we believe a) there is not sufficient motivation and b) this token exchange aligns incentives so competition would not make sense. We think this proposal would be the most sustainable way for the Uniswap ecosystem to fund high quality research and development.

Does Ekubo plan on being Starknet centric or move to other L2 chains, such as Optimism, and Arbitrum?

We plan to focus on Starknet, and do not intend to compete with Uniswap on other chains.

How is the valuation of $12 million for 20% of the company derived? That would put the project at around $60 million FDV? Do the current metrics, volume, users, transactions etc justify this? Is this comparable to similar seed round raises in the current climate for a new project <7 months old?

There are lots of metrics in the provided dashboards, but I would add that there must be a premium for this proposal to make sense for the following reasons:

  • The investment is made in UNI tokens as opposed to dollars (consider current liquidity, price risk and management overhead)
  • The arrangement is nonstandard and will require additional legal support
  • Ekubo, Inc. will become a core contributor to Uniswap protocol

Would it make more sense to have the UNI tokens tied to milestones from Ekubo over a 3-5 year period?

The costs to grow the business are largely upfront, which is where upside comes from in early stage investing. This deal would not make sense to us with milestones unless either party could terminate it at any point, which limits the potential upside for the DAO. It would also not account for the immediate benefits of our code contributions to V4. But above all, defining milestones for a 3-5 year time horizon is impossible, and a startup needs to manage rapidly shifting priorities. For these reasons we would not advance a proposal with milestones.

Does Ekubo’s extension architecture fit with hooks? Would these Ekubo extensions be able to be used as Uniswap Hooks on other chains? Is this covered in the standard contributor license agreement?

The idea for Ekubo extensions is mostly the same as hooks, but the implementations differ in some ways that we would encourage the Uniswap Labs team to adopt and in other ways that are more philosophical.

Extensions are written for a different execution environment, so not all of the extensions will make sense as hooks and vice versa. The collaboration on extensions and hooks would be limited to sharing of ideas, not copyright protected code.

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I like it!

I primarily see the value in this piece:

effectively onboarding the Ekubo team as core developers.

I do additionally like the ownership as a hedge for Uniswap if Starknet takes off. I think that benefit though is quite a bit more TBD though.

Given this, could you expand a bit on how you practically see “Ekubo team as core developers” working?

My thought is that might be hard in practice. Presumably everything you are doing is written in Cairo so Uniswap Labs or other entities can not simply re-use the code. Audits also can’t be cross leveraged. Potentially you could pilot some mechanism / protocol design things but if a different dev entity still needs to port those into the Uniswap codebase the value seems minimal.

To be clear, I’d love for Ekubo Inc to be a core developer of the Uniswap protocol but I just want to understand how that might functionally work a bit better.

Some brainstorms from my side…

  • Would Ekubo retain solidity developer talent to actually contribute to the Uniswap codebase directly?
  • Would Ekubo consider taking other supportive actions like managing the actual Uniswap V4 deployment on Ethereum? This would help showcase Ekubo Inc as a true core protocol dev team deploying a canonical V4 version.
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Would Ekubo retain solidity developer talent to actually contribute to the Uniswap codebase directly?

For uncontroversial improvements we would create issues on the GitHub repo describing each of our improvements and the impact, and also send pull requests with the changes.

For controversial changes, we could open discussions (potentially called a Uniswap improvement proposals) in the same format as EIPs to facilitate discussion. We can use data from Uniswap as well as Ekubo to support these proposals.

Ekubo will always benefit from having solidity developers on the team for any cross chain requirements.

Would Ekubo consider taking other supportive actions like managing the actual Uniswap V4 deployment on Ethereum? This would help showcase Ekubo Inc as a true core protocol dev team deploying a canonical V4 version.

If the process benefits from decentralization, we would be happy to take on the responsibility. I don’t think there are any maintenance tasks for V4 post-deployment, but if it’s considered valuable we can execute deployment scripts or participate in multisigs.

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Thanks for the response. The two statements at the end of my post were just brainstorming on what it might practically look like for Ekubo team to be core developers on the Uniswap protocol. Not meant to be conclusive.

If you have a more specific vision or ideas on that would love to hear them as well.

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The main difference I can see between this arrangement and Ethereum core developers is that there is no hard requirement for cooperation via a shared specification. It would be driven by incentives. But besides contributions to Uniswap protocol, work solely on Ekubo protocol is to the benefit of the DAO given the large stake the DAO would have in Ekubo protocol.

It would also be valuable for Ekubo, Inc to be able to create and influence proposals, so a delegation from the DAO to the team in addition to the UNI invested would help, ideally at least the minimum required to create a proposal.

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Thanks for the proposal @moody! It’s clear that for $12m $UNI, the DAO is receiving 20% of tokens in the protocol, but 0% of the equity in Ekubo, Inc. - which is reasonable. From this, I have a couple more operational questions around how this arrangement would work:

  • Does this constitute the only outside capital invested in the project to date or is this secondary to institutional investment into the parent company?
  • While these funds are “be spent at the discretion of the CEO of Ekubo, Inc. for operations, research and development”, how can we be sure that this will be invested solely in the AMM protocol vs. other potential operations at Ekubo?
  • What does this $12m unlock for Ekubo that it otherwise wouldn’t do? Will any of this work focus purely on v4 and driving liquidity to that?
  • I agree that milestones are likely overly perscriptive and ineffective, but an upfront allocation of $UNI to be used at a single individual’s sole discretion is also concerning. If the costs are primarily up front then:
    • Can you share a breakdown of expected expenses + a timeline?
    • Should the community expect these tokens to be promptly converted into USDC/USD to fund these expenses?

The two things I would like to see as a part of this proposal are:

  1. More detail into what:
    (a) “being a core developer” means to Ekubo & how Uniswap benefits
    (b) how these funds will be used to drive those goals in (a) and just fund the business of Ekubo, Inc.
  2. Some proposed oversight of how these funds are spent either by representatives of UF or a small group of delegates.

I have no doubt that your alignment to Uniswap is legitimate and I hope this is a successful proposal, but we have seen too many asks for a lump sum of tokens that are subsequently mismanaged to not press for more information and medium-term oversight before funding this endeavor.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts and discussing further!

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I have no doubt that your alignment to Uniswap is legitimate and I hope this is a successful proposal, but we have seen too many asks for a lump sum of tokens that are subsequently mismanaged to not press for more information and medium-term oversight before funding this endeavor.

I think there is a misunderstanding of the spirit of this proposal, which is our fault. This is not a grant, where oversight and milestones are appropriate because the return for the grant is only some work product. This is an exchange of UNI tokens for future Ekubo tokens.

This exchange aligns incentives such that Ekubo, Inc., by primarily focusing its efforts on Ekubo protocol and secondarily sharing improvements with Uniswap protocol, is a core contributor to Uniswap. In other words, because of Uniswap’s 20% stake in Ekubo protocol, Ekubo protocol could be considered Uniswap’s outpost on Starknet. The investment of UNI carries with it all the typical early stage investor risks (e.g. funds mismanagement, risk of smart contract bugs, ecosystem risk.)

As such, there are also no requirements imposed upon the DAO on how the future Ekubo token would be spent to improve Ekubo protocol. If the DAO decides to sell or redistribute all its Ekubo tokens immediately, it is free to do so.

We would not advance a proposal that includes oversight on spending or milestones, because it would make fundraising from the DAO far more burdensome than fundraising from venture capitalists. Ekubo, Inc. is completely bootstrapped and has not raised funds from any outside investor; this UNI would be spent to accelerate the growth of Ekubo protocol via hiring and reduce the personal risk of the employees, which is generally the purpose of seed stage investing. The proposal also keeps intact our upside if Ekubo were to succeed, which is extremely important to motivate continued high quality research and development.

Thank you for your questions and comments @benhoneill! And please let us know whether this addresses your questions.

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I’m conflicted about this proposal.

It’s interesting to compare it against the recent Zero protocol’s proposal and see the contrast.

  • Moody and the team have demonstrated their competence through track record of contributions to Uniswap and building an innovative DEX in a new programming language
  • getting the to contribute to Uniswap v4 could be beneficial for both sides
  • Ekubo is already a leading DEX on Starknet, already getting revenue & income
  • there are no plans to rewrite & deploy Uniswap on Starknet AFAIK, so potential conflicts of interests are reduced
  • there’s clear potential upside in the investment.

On the other hand, Ekubo is an very eary stage, a few months old, no audits, not open source, no information about the token and its distribution, the expected oversight from the DAO is very limited.

It would be good to diversify the DAO treasury, but it can be done in less risky ways. It also could be a good unclear if the DAO should engage in VC-style funding. VCs take many shots and can afford higher-risk bets.

Question — when you say development teams of Uniswap and Ekubo to collaborate, do you mean Uniswap Labs? Hooks decentralize the development a lot, but the Labs surely remain a key contributor. Others here have already raised the question on how the collaboration will happen. It would be helpful to understand what Labs think about these plans.

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While I would like to support this proposal, and am a big fan of the idea, I need to see a few concerns addressed.

$12m for 20% of the future token supply implies the uniswap dao will be investing in the Ekubo token at a $60mm fdv. In current market conditions and analyzing the L2 DEX landscape both pre TGE and liquid, this is a rich valuation and I would like to see it cut substantially in order to support the proposal.

Additionally, in order for the protocols to be aligned, both would need to hold the counterpart’s token and not just dump the allocation. To address this alignment I would like to see a guaranteed lock included the proposal, where both parties commit to holding the tokens for X years. From your prior comment regarding "milestones not making sense and “the allocation funding development”, it seems you will likely dump the tokens, leading to zero alignment between protocols.

Additionally, the claim that Ekubo will be core developers seems unclear as prior comments have alluded to. This would need KPIs added in order to show how this will be done… The claim that “This is not a grant, where oversight and milestones are appropriate” means that that the Ekubo team should not promise to be a core developer. Either add KPIs and metrics of how this will be done, or take out of proposal all together.

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Thanks @kfx and @MattOnChain for your comments.

Ekubo, Inc. will collaborate with any contributors to Uniswap protocol, including Uniswap Labs. I went into detail on what that might look like with my response to @Leighton.

Could you provide a short write-up on the examples you analyzed, and what you would propose based on your analysis? There are plenty of metrics in the dashboards we’ve shared, but there are not good examples for direct comparison given this is a novel funding mechanism with significant legal and financial overhead:

The investment will also most likely be subject to taxes; we don’t know a way to avoid this.

My perspective: $12m is ~0.8% of the current treasury value and Ekubo is already doing similar volume to Uniswap’s Optimism deployment without any incentives, a severely limited token bridge, no Starknet-native tokens, and only $2.5m in TVL (albeit mostly in stables due to gamification from AVNU.) There’s obviously a lot of room for growth.

What KPIs would make sense for an Ethereum core development team? Improve the performance of all clients by 10%? Merge 10 EIPs per year? I’d like to reiterate the following point as well:

I believe our collaboration has the potential to significantly improve Uniswap V4. I say this as the ex-eng lead of Uniswap V4 who has already shipped a singleton AMM with concentrated liquidity on Starknet.

Regarding selling the UNI–we would do so to fund operations and pay taxes until we have a sustainable source of revenue. It could make sense to split the payment up over several calendar years to minimize these taxes, but this is an implementation detail that introduces additional risk for Ekubo, Inc.

I think if you consider the overhead of this proposal, it’s unreasonable to claim the price is too high and we have to hold on to the UNI. This is not a typical venture deal of cash for equity. We are trailblazing this method which will open up future opportunities for the DAO to put its treasury to use.

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Could you provide a short write-up on the examples you analyzed, and what you would propose based on your analysis? There are plenty of metrics in the dashboards we’ve shared, but there are not good examples for direct comparison given this is a novel funding mechanism with significant legal and financial overhead:

[FDV] Velodrome at $53M, Aerodrome at $12M, ZigZag at $9M, Quickswap at $40M to name a few. Though Ekubo seems like a great DEX, there is no guarantee it will capture the marketshare these DEXs have as activity and competition in the StarkNet ecosystem progress. Additionally, airdrop farmers are a factor. For reference, Aerodrome has the highest fees and TVL of any app on BASE (5x Uniswap) and trades at $12M. Curious on the justification for 5x AERO valuation? Especially given this is a pre TGE investment with far higher risks.

Also as a side note - with Kakarot - can see Uniswap eventually deploying to Starknet.

What KPIs would make sense for an Ethereum core development team? Improve the performance of all clients by 10%? Merge 10 EIPs per year? I’d like to reiterate the following point as well:

How about a minimum of 1 meaningful contribution to the Uniswap protocol per quarter as gauged by the Foundation or Labs or the delegate community? Given no milestones it’s not like the DAO has recourse for this and I honestly don’t really think it is worth including from my perspective since likely your team will be focused on your product?

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EKUBO FEE and VALUE ANALYSIS:

1 day fee snapshot annualized (10/18/23)

$654,591 annualized fee generation (1793.4 day fee from Ekubo site x 365 days)

65% L2 farming discount:

$229,106.85 discounted yearly fee

$60,000,000 market cap (12 million x 5)

= 261.89 fee/MKT CAP (60,000,000 MKT/ $229,106.85 discounted fees)

7 day fee snapshot annualized (from defiLlama):

754,364 annualized fee generation (14,507 x 52)

65% L2 farming discount:

$264,027 discounted yearly fee

$60,000,000 market cap (12 million x 5)

= 227.25 fee/MKT CAP (60,000,000 MKT/ 264,027 discounted fees)

30 day fee snapshot annualized (from defiLlama)

$683,376 annualized fee generation (683,376)

65% L2 farming discount:

$239,181.6 dicounted yearly fee

$60,000,000 market cap (12 million x 5)

= 250 fee/MKT CAP (60,000,000 MKT/ $239,181.6 discounted fees)

L2 Farming Discount Number:

Uniswap volumes on optimism went from 42mill/day avg leading to airdrop date, to 14.5 mill a day avg volume post airdrop (65% drop in activity)

Fair Value Ratio > 80 (20~ for avg company assuming evaluating as P/E comparable x 4 times risk multiplier):

250/80 = 3.125 over value offered

12,000,000/3.125

Risk assessed Fair Value Counteroffer: $3,840,000

$12 million seems to be a bit of an ask for the current environment, and the current state of L2 airdrop farming. The actual cost to the UNI Dao would be more than $12,000,000 as the back end cost will end up having a sell pressure on UNI.

I do like the proposal in premise, but would like to see how Ekubo, Inc came up to the $60million market cap valuation. Considering UNI DAO would end up playing a hindered VC role in this proposal. Hindered since VC’s atleast have some oversight on the liquidity provided. This is objectively worse than a VC since it is presented as a no strings raise.

I would say if this proposal could come down to >$4 million in UNI for 20% share of Ekubo then it would be more appealing.

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  1. Currently, Starknet only has 37 millon USD in TVL based on DeFi llama. Sure, it’s partly that Starknet’s token itself is not out yet, but if it’s launched, and TVL increases, there will be also many similar AMM that are competing. It’s very risky and early for Uniswap community to take such.

For example, Velodrome Finance is the most used AMM on Arbitrum and its marketcap based on Coinmarketcap is less than 5 million USD

  1. Another issue is this might become a situation where Uniswap community doesn’t benefit from the investment while the cost is still happening
  1. I believe it makes more strategic sense for Uniswap community to work with Starknet and secure grant from Starknet and use the portion to potentially invest in dApps like Ekubo. The role of Uniswap governance should be minimizing the risk to UNI holders and Uniswap DAO while having sustainable and resilient growth.
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We appreciate the feedback. However, these analyses are not of sufficient rigor. For example, none of these analyses compare the effectiveness of the products or the potential for growth (e.g. Ekubo is 1-2 orders of magnitude more capital efficient than the other projects without offering any incentives.) Discounting the annualized fees from the first month of operation, based on Optimism’s activity, is completely arbitrary. And none take into account the tax burden, operational overhead, or any of the other points that would justify a significant premium.

We will move the proposal forward to the temperature check with $12m for 20%. VCs are well represented in the Uniswap DAO and we trust they will consider whether the exchange is at a fair price in determining their votes.

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After reviewing the proposal to onboard Ekubo, Inc. as a core developer, we will not be supporting this vote. The title of this governance post is misleading; this is not a matter of onboarding a core developer for the DAO, but rather an investment proposal. The current proposal lacks necessary scrutiny and sets a risky precedent for protocol governance. Especially, given the size of the request.

Our primary reason for this stance is rooted in what we believe to be the core purpose of protocol governance. While that may differ among stakeholders, we strongly believe it is NOT structured to facilitate investments with speculative valuations.

We won’t engage in the due diligence process for this; however, we are open to facilitating introductions to investment firms capable of conducting proper diligence and have allocated capital for such scenarios as this.

We urge stakeholders involved in this vote to align this decision with their internal processes, seriously considering the check size.

_

As a delegate, I could think of many topics for discussion that might warrant capital allocation. Some of these could include onboarding appropriate core contributors, plans for cross-chain expansion, community grants, general growth plans, and fee switch implementation. Approving this proposal without appropriate knowledge, research, and thoroughness undermines potential goals and compromises the integrity of future protocol governance decisions.

Therefore, while we fully support Starknet, appreciate the efforts behind this, and thank @moody for his contributions to the protocol. We cannot endorse it in its current form.

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Thanks for sharing. I will adjust the title of the proposal for the temperature check. Quoting the below for visibility.

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Thanks for the reply. It’s somewhat clear what you plan to do from your side. Uniswap Labs is in a privileged position among other contributors, because they have merge access to v4-core/periphery/docs etc. repositories. I understand that normally Labs stay out of governance discussions, and for a good reason, but in this case it would be important to learn their position on the proposed collaboration, and on the decentralization of the protocol development as such.

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Hi all. Some good back and forth here. I’ve spoken to @moody and a few delegates to ask some clarifying questions. I thought it might be useful to post my understanding of the proposed transaction to help define the costs and benefits to both parties.

If this proposal were to pass, the following things would happen:

  • 3m UNI would be transferred from the Timelock to Ekubo Inc.
  • The v4-core-license-grants.uniswap.eth subname would be created
  • An additional use grant text record for Ekubo Inc. would be created on that subname
  • A new Franchiser contract would be deployed and funded with 2.5m UNI. That Franchiser instance’s owner would be the Timelock, and the delegatee would be Ekubo Inc.
  • Ekubo Inc. would promise to transfer 20% of Ekubo’s native token to the Timelock’s proxy address on Starknet at some date in the near future
  • Ekubo Inc. would promise to raise issues, participate in discussions, and make pull requests on the core and periphery repositories of the Uniswap V4 code prior to its freeze in the coming months. Such collaboration would be valuable given Moody’s experience in both architecting V4 and putting Ekubo into production on Starknet.

Moody has clarified above, but it is worth restating that the long-term alignment of Ekubo and Uniswap is financial in nature, not formally collaborative. Put more plainly, following the contributions Ekubo Inc. will make to V4, Uniswap governance can expect to benefit from their work via the potential increased value of its Ekubo token allocation rather than, for example, help building Uniswap V5. The Ekubo code base is and will continue to be closed source.

The idea of additional core contributors to the Uniswap protocol is certainly one that is worth exploring. There’s no strict definition of what the term means, and indeed a strict definition could limit the proliferation of teams that we ultimately consider to be core contributors. With that in mind, I suggest that delegates consider this proposal on the merits of the transaction itself, rather than the labels that might be applied to Ekubo Inc.

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