Temperature Check - [Should Uniswap services be paid in UNI?]

Temperature Check
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Paying for services came up in the community call yesterday and has been a feature of past forum discussions. When discussing payment, it’s often been taken for granted that payments would be made in the form of UNI tokens.

Without drilling into the details of how Uniswap governance might fund services with US dollar stablecoins, this post is to gauge opinion on whether UNI should be used for payments.

Link to snapshot: https://snapshot.page/#/uniswap/proposal/QmdpXifyHieoN3AqAxnBi1YAuJNZv3bGAuB7BcnkcSvUic

The rationale is simple - refrain from spending tokens today that we expect to increase in value in the future. This will grow the wealth stored in the Uniswap governance treasury and will reserve the distribution of UNI for only the most important activities.

This will also send a strong signal to the rest of the community about the value that governance perceives in the UNI token. Something that could be undermined by arbitrarily spending it on everyday services.

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I think overall it depends a lot on the type of work that is being rewarded.
UNI distribution is not just the payment option - it is also an invitation to participate in the governance process.

So maybe a mixed rewarding method could be the play - using UNI rewards as a bonus.

For example, if the Uniswap community would hire the Discord chat support, we could pay the necessary amount in DAI plus add UNI tokens as a bonus.

This way, the UNI supply would be distributed towards good actors who help to grow the network - and this supply distribution wouldn’t have to be sold in order to pay for the bills.

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This model’s implementation could be done by using Aave and borrowing DAI/other USD tokens.
As Aave’s community decided that UNI can’t be borrowed, it would not create additional threats to the governance, like using Compound would currently.
The debts can be paid eventually through the % of the fees.
This would also allow for mixed distribution to go on for much longer than the initial distribution period.

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The ability to use collateralized debts creates some interesting opportunities. For example, can a liquidity mining program be paid in DAI? Should it?

There is an important thing to note about not distributing UNI, though.
If nothing is done with the governance treasury, by 2024, 73.5% of UNI supply would be distributed towards Advisors, Investors, and the Team.
And I believe most would not favor this outcome, including the Team.

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