There’s some support for setting aside some UNI for a new category of underrepresented delegates, specifically people and firms that are actively developing products on top of Uniswap or in the Uniswap ecosystem. Qualifications for this category should likely be different from more traditional delegates, as they have not generally been involved in the governance process to this point. Some initial questions to get the conversation going:
what should baseline qualifications be to be considered?
what process changes would be necessary? (e.g. should we have a separate election?)
I actually think we should do this experiment as it will show why governance participation is important. But can we have opinion from people and firms that are developing products on top of Uniswap or in Uniswap ecosystem to hear their perspective?
Ideally, it’s a positive loop where these teams themselves are committed to participate in governance and give their feedback
Agreed on the experiment. Historically builders in any ecosystem tends to not be as active as other figures. This is something worth improving, because builders are the ones who make the ecosystem extremely valuable.
Aligning incentives can probably help.
Does for example make sense to involve teams that, after a grant from any uniswap related program, deliver a succesfull product, to keep them even more tied to the ecosystem? Aligning incentive is: uniswap did help me improve my product, I am going to stay involved in what is happening around here.
Can we also involve historically og developers, teams and contributors? Aligning incentive is: I have been a core contributor of main uniswap products, or partners’ products, my whole life, and staying in touch with governance will help me drive decision and steer the convo toward topics that interest me. But this poses the secondary question: how come that these ogs were not interested to be involved in the first place?
Likely there are even more cases, I just mentioned the first two coming to my mind.
Agree on both above points here. Maybe this discussion could be tailored more towards Uniswap ecosystem delegation allocations, where it could be Devs, as well as traders, projects building on top of Uni, past grants, etc.
As builders I can add that its been extremely difficult getting the required support if you are not connected.
I think the market is still traumatised which is almost a rational for the MEME coin madness. (ie. It’s all a scam, Burn it down)
I would advise that any movement in this area be explored with view of supporting developers on-chain who have a history of continuously building and ensuring allocations are accountable.
At Bunni, we’ve consistently engaged with the Uniswap community, from participating in governance calls to collaborating with the Uniswap Foundation and other key contributors. Being delegated votes has always been a goal for us.
We fully support the proposal to allocate voting power to developers who actively contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem. The qualification criteria could be centered around tangible contributions, such as building products or tools that directly drive Uniswap’s growth. We believe this initiative is a positive step towards ensuring that builders have a voice in governance, and we’re excited to be part of this process.
You raise a good point. It’s separate from this conversation, but it might make sense for the DAO to set up an RFP for an entity or person to fill a developer relations function. Someone with expertise in working with all the Uniswap protocols and the peripheral contracts who can help teams understand the resources and materials to integrate Uniswap into their app or who is building on top of Uniswap.
We’ve fielded a decent number of these questions in our capacity of Oku while expanding Uniswap v3 to new chains, but maybe there should be an official function for emerging teams to access.
separate from this conversation, but it might make sense for the DAO to set up an RFP for an entity or person to fill a developer relations function.
Should this be a reportable (impact assessment) outcome for the Uniswap Foundation? since they’re the ones disbursing incentives for protocols/value-add? I presume (correct me if wrong) they should have a sense of what already exists otherwise they wouldn’t be able to identify innovative service providers.
Naturally delegates should stay on top of matters because the foundation is probably the biggest single expenditure (benchmark against peers?).
If given the option, would prefer developers or contributors who also have been voting extensively such as @bendi of Scopelift to have priority in receiving voting power
create a shortlist of developers that are considered quite important for the ecosystem
[optional] open an RFC for other developers who would like to participate to this
create a matrix that lists all of these devs, on one side governance participation (in %), on the other impact on the ecosystem.
The best elements from the matrix could be put to snapshot to assign delegation, with potential expiring mechanisms discussed in the other thread.
Few things here:
defining initial list might introduce subjectivity
defining impact can be too subjective unless we also define proper kpi (ie: tvl contribution through the product or other). Due to uniswap’s nature, is extremely likely that any list won’t be omincomprehensive.
Point 2 is likely mitigated by being a bit more loose on evaluation and inclusion in the snapshot, so that dao has space to give their opinion.
Rewarding active dev voters is important, but if the goal is to bring in new participants, relying heavily on voting activity as a benchmark might miss the mark. Many developers, are deeply involved in the ecosystem through development and engagement, but may not have had voting power yet.
I agree that having a clear, trackable metric like voting participation is a great mindset—it’s a tangible data point and makes the process more transparent and less subjective. Seems like what JoJo is alluding to somewhat. I just don’t know if I love it for this goal.
Agree with you. I also think it’s a good experiment because the issue for Uniswap ecosystem has been many have big voting power but they don’t actually exercise them, especially over the long term. And logically, their reasoning for not exercising was economically rational as they don’t have time and resources to contribute to governance despite their large voting power.
And because the governance is not redelegating actively, the voting power ended up not being used well from the ecosystem perspective. So it would be interesting to see over long period like 1 or 2 years how this experiment turns out, but with ability to revoke such voting power.
We agree with @Doo_StableLab and believe the most important element for this program to work is to get the perspective of Uniswap builders. Ideally, we would gather thoughts from multiple entities and decide whether and how to design the delegation program accordingly.
Like @GFXlabs mentioned, we at A51 Finance think there should be a place within the Uniswap v3 eco-system where emerging projects on top of Uniswap don’t have to compete with already big projects. Their performance should be and innovation should be looked at independently and given a chance to shine.