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.ethsubname 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
ownerwould be the Timelock, and thedelegateewould 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.