Trial run a Technical Advisory Board (TAB)

Temperature Check
1

Summary

This proposal seeks to trial run a Technical Advisory Board (TAB) within the Uniswap DAO with the aim of providing expert insights on proposals for a period of 12 months. The TAB will be assisted by a professional delegate who will act in service to this body. To empower the TAB, a total of 2.5 million in UNI will be delegated to the expiring Franchiser contracts.

Motivation

The Uniswap DAO governance process plays a crucial role in shaping the protocol’s evolution, yet it currently lacks consistent, structured technical expertise. While many active delegates contribute valuable insights, only a small subset possess deep technical knowledge. Simultaneously, many developers and builders, who have direct experience with Uniswap’s codebase or the market dynamics surrounding its use (e.g. partnerships, integrations, supporting infrastructure like routers and aggregators), lack the bandwidth or the structured pathway to engage meaningfully in governance.

Through our conversations with various teams building on Uniswap, we consistently heard that developers and technical contributors want to provide input but find the current governance process opaque or inaccessible. Many expressed that their expertise could help improve governance proposals by assessing technical feasibility, estimating implementation timelines, identifying risks, and evaluating potential costs. Furthermore, developers emphasized that better governance participation could help ensure that ecosystem upgrades align with the needs of those who build on and integrate with Uniswap.

By establishing a Technical Advisory Board (TAB), we aim to bridge this gap—providing the Uniswap DAO with a dedicated body of experts who can offer structured, reliable technical guidance while ensuring that builders have a clearer pathway to engage in governance. The TAB will serve as a critical feedback mechanism, improving the quality of governance proposals, mitigating risks, and ultimately strengthening Uniswap’s decentralized development process.

Background

Technical expertise is a cornerstone of effective protocol governance, yet it has often been an underrepresented voice in Uniswap DAO decision-making. Inspired by Optimism’s Developer Advisory Board, we propose implementing a similar structure, adapted to Uniswap’s unique governance model and market position.

Our research and interviews revealed a recurring theme: builders who work closely with Uniswap’s infrastructure often see governance decisions that could benefit from their insights but lack a structured way to contribute. Key takeaways from these discussions include:

  • Developers want a role in governance but need a structured way to engage.
  • Many proposals lack clear technical feasibility assessments, leading to inefficiencies and unforeseen challenges.
  • Builders can provide critical feedback on proposal risks, implementation timelines, and ecosystem impact and budget costs.
  • A dedicated advisory group would enhance transparency, community trust, and long-term sustainability.

To address these challenges, the TAB will focus on delivering expert evaluations of governance proposals, helping the DAO make informed technical decisions. The TAB will work alongside a Professional Delegate (PD) to ensure their insights are effectively communicated and integrated into governance discussions. By creating a structured mechanism for technical input, we aim to foster a more inclusive and technically sound governance process for Uniswap’s continued growth.

Specification

Technical Advisory Board (TAB):

Composition:

The Technical Advisory Board (TAB) will consist of 6 seasoned professionals, including builders, security researchers and experts with significant experience in smart contracts and the Uniswap protocol. The strength of the TAB will lie in its diverse expertise and its commitment to providing comprehensive, start-to-finish support for informed governance decisions within the Uniswap DAO.

This structure emerged from dialogues with Uniswap’s ecosystem, revealing a lack of technical expertise in governance, often resulting in impractical proposals. Inspired by Optimism’s Developer Advisory Board, we tailored the TAB to balance technical evaluation and community education, thus improving proposal quality and transparency while preserving DAO control through iterative feedback and a decentralized focus.

Through dialogue with builders and the Uniswap Foundation, we suggest the following individuals be part of the first cohort of the Technical Advisory Board:

  1. Akshat Mittal - Senior Protocol Engineer at Reserve and Founder of Metacrypt. Akshat has over 10 years of experience in the technology space building products and startups. Since committing to the Web3 ecosystem 6 years ago, he has contributed to and developed several DeFi protocols. He has deep technical expertise in all things DeFi, from building fundamentals to protocol design and beyond.
  2. Alex Netto - Founder and CEO at blockful, an organization preventing governance attacks, increasing DAOs security on different fronts. Experienced in smart contract engineering, governance research, and Uniswap V4 by winning its category on an ETH Global hackathon. He’s also an ENS metagov steward, proposer, and member of the security council. Hands-on experience with
  3. Ben DiFrancesco - Founder, CEO and Lead Engineer at ScopeLift. Ben and his firm have contributed to mission critical smart contracts for many noteworthy projects, including Uniswap. He brings deep experience building on the EVM, and particular expertise in DAO governance engineering.
  4. Dakotah Moses - Leads growth at Bunni, a Uniswap v4-native DEX focused on liquidity optimization and rehypothecation. He bridges the gap between engineering and strategy—helping to translate complex technical systems into narratives and programs that drive adoption
  5. Haardik H - Experienced developer with over 7 years of professional involvement in the space as an engineer and consultant ranging across Identity, Privacy, Enterprise, and DeFi organizations/projects. He has also built and run technical educational programs that have onboarded hundreds of thousands of developers into the space through his roles at LearnWeb3 and Atrium Academy.
  6. Kris O’Shea - Blockchain developer at Olas Protocol and previously a developer at Sumero Finance. As a Uniswap ambassador and hookathon winner, Kris brings in-depth experience building and securing smart contracts across Ethereum & EVM compatible layer 2s as well as Starknet & the CairoVM. A recognized contributor to the Uniswap ecosystem, he has co-authored V4 technical documentation and mentored teams at Uniswap hackathons.

Responsibilities:

  • Analyze all governance proposals from inception, evaluating the feasibility and impact of proposals which are technical in nature throughout the voting process, while providing timely and insightful feedback.
  • Proactively identify and address potential risks or unintended consequences within proposal design
  • Vote on all proposals during the 12-month term and provide a brief overview of the TAB’s rationale.
  • Translate complex technical concepts into clear and accessible language for non-technical delegates.
  • Develop educational resources and explanations to enhance understanding of proposal implications. This could include publishing reports, hosting webinars, and generally simplifying technical concepts to foster community understanding

Professional Delegate (PD):

Role:

  • Create an onboarding package for TAB which includes documents and info sessions to ensure smooth onboarding and uniformity of context and knowledge.
  • Act as an operational support role for the TAB, ensuring their recommendations are accurately represented in governance forums and votes.
  • Manage day-to-day governance interactions and communication with the broader Uniswap community on behalf of the TAB.
  • Outline a communication plan in cooperation with the TAB, detailing how they will interact with the community, share their findings, and explain their recommendations.
  • Facilitate logistics, such as organizing meetings and maintaining public-facing documentation.
  • Assist TAB in creating educational initiatives such as workshops, webinars, or documentation to help community members understand technical proposals and the governance process.
  • Work with the TAB members to identify gaps in knowledge or expertise within the board and coordinate with external experts when necessary to address those gaps.
  • Act as a liaison between the TAB and the Uniswap Foundation or other ecosystem stakeholders to align efforts and gather additional context when needed.

Positioning:

The PD will not act independently but will serve solely as a representative and operational extension of the TAB. The role of PD shall be performed by DAOplomats

Voting Power Delegation:

  • 2.5 million UNI tokens delegated to the TAB to empower their governance participation.
  • TAB members shall create a 4 of 6 multi-sig which will hold the VP for a period of 1 year.
  • The TAB wallet is expected to vote on every proposal.
  • Uniswap Governance retains control and can revoke the delegation if necessary.

Transparency:

All TAB discussions, recommendations, and PD actions will be publicly documented in governance forums.

Timeline

This timeline shall go into effect if the DAO votes to execute the trial run.

  1. Month 1: Initial cohort of TAB members will be chosen based on research and feedback from the UFD (Done)

  2. Month 2: Proposal will be put to vote and deployment of franchiser contracts for token delegation shall proceed

  3. Month 3: TAB is onboarded with the resources created by the PD and they begin reviewing proposals and participating in governance.

  4. Month 6: Conduct the first performance review and gather community feedback.

  5. Month 12: Evaluate performance of current members based on community feedback and open positions to replace members if necessary

  6. Month 14: Conduct fresh elections if members need to be replaced

Budget

Technical advisors and professional delegates will be paid in UNI, delivered as a continuous stream over the length of their term. The following table only summarize the UNI to allocated for the budget, further clarification on how the actual expenses shall occur is detailed in the compensation structure section.

| Role                  | Monthly Compensation (UNI) | Number of Members | Duration (Months) | Total (UNI) |
|-----------------------|----------------------------|-------------------|-------------------|-------------|
| Technical Advisor     | 400*                       | 6                 | 12                | 28,800      |
| Professional Delegate | 1,000                      | 1                 | 12                | 12,000      |
| Buffer*               |                            |                   |                   |             |
| Total                 |                            |                   |                   | 41,800      |

*A buffer budget is allocated for creating educational materials for the community to understand technical proposals as well as incorporating help from other experts whenever expertise inside the TAB proves to be insufficient. Any unused funds shall be returned to the DAO treasury at the end of the program.

*400 UNI compensation is split into two payments of 200 UNI and 1000 USDC

Compensation Structure:

  • Total monthly compensation will be 200 UNI and 1000 USDC
    • Each TAB member shall be compensated 200 UNI/month via a superfluid stream
    • A second stream of 1200 UNI/month shall be sent to the UAC wallet. The UAC shall send each TAB member 1000 USDC per month.
  • Professional Delegate will receive 1000 UNI/month via superfluid stream and accepts the consequence of price volatility and shall perform their duties regardless

Proposal call data:

  • Eight payment streams of 12 months will be set up via superfluid. (Six for TAB members, one for PD and one to the UAC)
  • One transfer will be set up to send the buffer to the TAB multi-sig address
  • 2.5M UNI will be transferred to a franchiser contract which delegates the tokens to the same TAB multi-sig

Uniswap Governance retains control and can revoke stream as well as delegation via a proposal

2

We understand the need to delegate to devs, but what is the reasoning for having it as a single board and having separate Professional Delegate role? It would be better to split the voting power among devs and withdraw delegation for those who are inactive. Creating the board and managing it are more complex than it needs to be.

1 Like
3

Some initial thoughts being:

  • Agree with @Doo_StableLab in that it makes more sense to just delegate to technical members directly without this one delegate platform, one voice structure. Less overhead, each one gets a say, and more autonomy.
  • Effectively creating one delegate platform that costs 40800 UNI (~$225k)/year to run seems pretty inefficient. Some opinions and suggestions we have on that if conversations progress, but for now will focus on concept of the board itself.
  • If we set up something like this, why not have the community decide the first technical delegates from the start?
1 Like
4

Thanks for the feedback @Doo_StableLab @Juanbug

We acknowledge that establishing a TAB introduces some organizational complexity. However, this structure is designed to balance the need for consistent, high-quality technical input with the practical challenges of engaging busy developers, ensuring the DAO benefits from both expertise and governance fluency. The UF has tested direct delegation to technical teams like Scopelift and Atrium, but only Scopelift remains active. Our discussions with developers revealed that most lack the time or governance expertise to participate consistently, as they juggle full-time roles at their companies. Most successful participants of the ‘Delegate incentive program’ have a full-time role focused on governance, which allows them to gain expertise over governance as a broader topic and adhere to time sensitive nature of the governance process.

The TAB team setup enables members to support one another, maintaining consistent input despite external commitments and the participation of a PD enables smooth onboarding and understanding of the governance process. Additionally, this group is also tasked with increasing the technical awareness of the larger delegate cohort, which delegate incentive programs have not identified how to successfully perform. Unlike individual delegations, which risk fragmented decision-making, the TAB provides coordinated advice and accountability. A unified TAB ensures coordinated input and accountability, streamlining technical advice to the DAO

The budget reflects the extensive work required, including technical evaluations, governance participation, and community education efforts. We along with the UF have spoken with many builders, devs, and security experts, to assist the community in identifying the best talent out there and it is ultimately the community who will decide whether or not to accept this group.

5

For L2 governance, as well as for dapps like lending markets, it would make sense to have this type of structure. As you mentioned, Optimism has DAB. DAOs like Compound have OpenZeppelin on retainer. For Uniswap, the criticality for a technical board is comparatively less. Let’s look at the proposals over the past year.

Proposal Name Date Function
Lower Onchain Proposal Threshold Jan 19th, 2024 GovernorBravo _setProposalThreshold called
Deploy Uniswap V3 on Rootstock Jan 19th, 2024 ENS operations
Deploy Uniswap V3 on Zora Feb 8th, 2024 ENS operations
Deploy Uniswap V2 on all chains with V3 Feb 9th, 2024 ENS operations
Uniswap Revitalization and Growth Proposal Feb 16th, 2024 Send UNI
Update Uni v3/v2 Deployment Process (March 2024) Apr 21st, 2024 ENS operations
Onboarding Package Bundle Apr 21st, 2024 Send UNI
Mobilizing the Uniswap Treasury Apr 27th, 2024 Send UNI
DeFi Education Fund May 21st, 2024 Stream UNI Send
Uniswap Delegate Reward – 3 Months Cycle 1 May 25th, 2024 Send UNI
Uniswap Arbitrum LTIPP Matching Jun 22nd, 2024 Send UNI
Onboarding Package for Gnosis Chain Aug 7th, 2024 Send UNI
Deploy Uniswap v3 on X Layer Aug 14th, 2024 Send UNI
Uniswap Delegate Reward Initiative – Cycle 2 Aug 26th, 2024 Send UNI
Proposal to activate 2, 3, 4 bps fee–tiers on Base Sep 5th, 2024 Fee tiers creation targeting Base receiver
Uniswap Accountability S3 Renewal and Rebalance Sep 15th, 2024 Send UNI
[Updated] Forse Analytics for Uniswap Revitalization and Growth Oct 19th, 2024 Send UNI
Uniswap Growth Program Trial Oct 21st, 2024 Send UNI
Supporting Tally’s Development and Enhancements for Uniswap Nov 21st, 2024 Send UNI
Incentive Package for Sonic Jan 2nd, 2025 Send UNI
Incentive Package for Sonic and Celo Jan 2nd, 2025 Send UNI
Scale Uniswap Liquidity on Celo Jan 3rd, 2025 Send UNI
Uniswap DAO Principles Jan 10th, 2025 ENS operations
Governance Proposal – Adopt The SEAL Safe Harbor Agreement Jan 10th, 2025 Agreement via Safe Harbor Registry
Uniswap Delegate Reward Initiative – Cycle 3 Feb 24th, 2025 Send UNI
Unichain and Uniswap v4 Liquidity Incentives Mar 11th, 2025 Send UNI
Uniswap Unleashed Mar 11th, 2025 Send UNI
BoB Uniswap v3 Incentives Package Apr 15th, 2025 Send UNI
Establish Uniswap v4 Licensing Process Apr 22nd, 2025 ENS operations

Most of these txns are for sending UNI, in other words, they’re funding proposals. These don’t really require technical analysis. The only time a parameter in the Governor Bravo contract was called was during the lowering of the proposal threshold. The most “complex” proposal from a technical perspective was when fee tiers were added to Base, which simply targeted the Base receiver contract. So, 2/29 proposals were more “critical,” if that’s how we want to label txns. Anything to do with ENS operations is simply for transparency and operational purposes, not touching any governance contracts or contracts that are associated with fees.

More complicated proposals would include those related to the Franchisers, which have been set up and reviewed by ScopeLift—who also seem to be on this committee, which seems a bit repetitive. Turning on fees is also going to require some in-depth review and care. For those, I’d assume the UF would double and triple check the soundness of those proposals. Am I missing any other types of proposals that would warrant a technical review board?

1 Like
6

We see this proposal as a way to tackle two distinct challenges: developers’ engagement in governance and technical reviews.

As @jengajojo highlighted, increasing the technical awareness of the larger delegate cohort is a particularly important and valuable goal — we agree this should be tackled.

That said, we have some reservations about the proposed TAB’s current scope and structure. As @AbdullahUmar noted, only 2 out of 29 proposals since the start of 2024 would have benefited from a technical review. With such a limited current workload, there’s a risk that a formal, multi-member board might introduce more overhead than value at this stage.

Instead, we’d like to propose a more intermediate approach that leverages/coordinates with existing efforts funded by the Uniswap Foundation. Specifically, @blockful was recently awarded a grant focused on Governance Security Review. While their current scope doesn’t include technical reviews of governance proposals, this could be extended to do so without requiring the creation of a new structure.

We believe the DAO should extend @blockful’s current mandate from the UF, with a matching mandate focusing on the technical review of governance proposals.

We believe @blockful is a strong fit for two main reasons:

  1. They are already actively engaged with Uniswap’s governance security, with a scope that closely aligns with what’s envisioned for the TAB;
  2. They successfully provide this kind of technical review support for ENS governance.

This would allow us to address the technical assurance gap in a lean, efficient, and immediate way — while leaving room to reassess the need for a more formal advisory body down the line if the proposal volume or complexity increases.

As for developers’ engagement in governance, we believe that it is a separate challenge that should be addressed independently.

1 Like
7

We have some concerns regarding this proposal:

  • Unlike Optimism and its Developer Advisory Board, and as @AbdullahUmar remarked, Uniswap DAO does not regular engage in technical protocol upgrade discussions that would require a dedicated structure with deep development expertise. Regarding integrations and deployments, the UAC already handles these tasks effectively. As for partnerships, the Foundation plays a leading role, along with Alpha.Growth within the DAO. For all these reasons, we do not believe creating a new structure with the proposed characteristics is necessary.

  • Regarding the scope of this new proposed structure:

Except for the last point, we believe that the rest of the listed tasks are inherent responsibilities of all delegates. Delegates are compensated to review proposals, provide feedback, raise concerns when misalignments are detected, and vote — as explicitly stated and approved in the Uniswap DAO Principles. Therefore, we do not believe it is necessary to create a new structure whose responsibilities would largely overlap with those of the delegates.

  • Regarding the delegation of V.P. to developers: this issue was already discussed in [RFC] Treasury Delegation Round 2 and did not move forward. We do not agree with introducing it now into this proposal with six pre-selected individuals.

  • We also disagree with the approach of creating a seven-member structure where all members have already been chosen, preventing other interested candidates from applying and limiting the DAO’s ability to select its members.

  • For all the reasons stated above, we fail to see what concrete value this kind of structure would bring to the DAO, which may be necessary in other DAOs with regular deep technicals scopes, but is not the case for UniswapDAO, especially considering that it would cost 41,800 UNI per year.

2 Likes
8

This didn’t move forward in the treasury delegation proposal explicitly because this proposal was in the works.

9

I think another issue is
-Is it really possible to coordinate such a large team to assess and vote on all the proposals without making it quite cumbersome. There are weeks without proposals but there are also weeks that have several proposals and I afraid in practice, there will be some TAB members who are more active than others and yet discouraged because they all get the same budget regardless of whether they are active or not.

I suggest it to make it individually rather than collectively and also compensation to be based on their individual contribution rather than collective.

10

This is an accurate observation, however there is a difference between responsibility and ability to execute on these tasks. The existing incentive schemes have not found a way to incentivize these without making the evaluation highly subjective. Hence the DAO ends up optimizing for quantitive elements which do not necessarily offer technical feedback.

Another challenge is that many delegates use a team account instead of a personal account to participate in conversations, this disallows the broader community to understand if the feedback is coming from a technical expert or a full-time governance role holder in that team.

We acknowledge that the first iteration of the six member TAB comes as a concrete proposal. This is based on our conversations with various teams, who are already part of the uniswap community by playing various roles such as builders, developers, security experts and researchers. We are open to understanding why specifically any of the suggested team members are underqualified or are in any way not considered part of the DAO.

I agree with this opinion, hence we expect some members to be more active than others not only as a function of time, but also as a function of expertise and role. This does indeed mean that there will be variations in activity based on different factors, not just time. However evaluating each contribution becomes a subjective endeavor which can potentially become equally cumbersome to coordinate. On the other hand working as a team allows members to step in at the right moment and support each other as opposed to competing, with may lead to domination of opinions from people who have more flexible schedules than others to manage with a full-time job.

This is exactly the goal we are trying to achieve and based on the comments so far, it seems that delegates are not opposed to it. We believe that this awareness will be enhanced, not only by educational activities, but also feedback which come directly from experts as well as the ability to voice this opinion via participation in voting.

1 Like
11

Circling back, I do think it’s needed to delegate to devs and other contributors. Especially for example, @bendi of ScopeLift team has been an active governance participant and do understand that it can be beneficial to have such program. But we do think the structure could be different including ability for other interested participants to apply as well.

2 Likes
12

I understand your focus on the technical evaluation aspect and you’re right that the expertise of the TAB members will certainly be valuable in analyzing the code and potential impacts of proposals. While technical evaluation, especially the final calldata review, is a crucial component of the TAB’s responsibilities, the vision for this group is broader. We see the TAB as providing holistic support throughout the entire proposal lifecycle – from initial concept to final execution. This includes identifying potential second-order effects, translating complex technical details for the wider community, and offering informed opinions on the overall implications of proposals. For simpler proposals, the level of in-depth technical analysis required might be less intensive, but the TAB’s role in providing context and ensuring broader understanding remains vital. We believe this comprehensive approach will contribute significantly to more informed governance decisions within the DAO.

This proposal which was posted recently https://gov.uniswap.org/t/rfc-hook-manager-framework-on-chain-policy-orchestration-for-uniswap-v4/25552 is a great example of how TAB would be helpful for the DAO

Thanks for your support and for highlighting the importance of open participation in the future. We absolutely agree that subsequent membership of the TAB should be determined through an election process accessible to all interested and qualified participants. For this initial trial run, to streamline the setup and ensure we had a functional group ready to contribute quickly, we conducted extensive research and spoke with numerous developers and technical experts. We selected individuals we believe possess the diverse skillset needed to fulfill the TAB’s responsibilities as we’ve outlined them – which include not just technical expertise but also the ability to communicate effectively and think critically about the broader implications of proposals. We intend to produce a report on the TAB’s activities and learnings before the next election, which should provide the community and potential candidates with a clearer understanding of the role and its expectations. This will help ensure a well-informed and robust election process for future TAB members.