Uniswap Accountability Committee Charter

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Uniswap Accountability Committee Charter

Version 1.0 (August 2025)
Current Members: Jordan Karstadt (@DonOfDAOs) | @AbdullahUmar | PGov (@Juanbug) | @alicecorsini | Doo Wan Nam (@Doo_StableLab)

This publication is strictly informational and not part of a broader RFC or proposal. Further, the charter is an evolving document subject to change and amendment per the needs of the DAO

I. The Committee:

The UAC is a community-constructed, credibly-neutral, DAO-aligned entity tasked with:

  1. Coordinating DAO Operations
  2. Distributing Salient Information, and
  3. Representing the DAO’s Interests and General Advancement in Public and Private Environments

across a broad and expanding set of contexts. In decentralized and distributed ecosystems with hundreds of, often pseudononymous or non-vocal actors, a wide range of endeavors become structurally difficult. From navigating and overseeing 3rd-party engagements to distributing salient information, DAOs are not afforded the same efficiencies as centralized entities.

The UAC exists to smooth and navigate these complexities, offering the DAO the benefits of decentralized structures while mitigating its limitations. The UAC thereby enables operational efficiency, communication, and alignment across Uniswap governance.

II. UAC Positioning:

The UAC is uniquely positioned to bridge this gap. Of the three major entities in the Uniswap Ecosystem, the UAC is the only organization that is fully

  1. DAO-involved
  2. DAO-elected (composed of DAO members), AND
  3. DAO-funded

This sets it apart structurally from the Uniswap Foundation (UF) and Uniswap Labs.

Furthermore, the UAC’s lighter-weight nature and seasonal funding advantageously create a uniquely tight, iterative feedback loop with the DAO. This advances matters of transparency, ensures performance is visible and measurable, and aligns UAC output with evolving DAO needs. This design is appropriate given the division of labor across Uniswap governance:

  • Uniswap Labs: UL owns brand assets and facilitates core development. UL is minimally active in governance or with DAO matters.

  • Uniswap Foundation: The UF tackles large-scale, long-term, ecosystem-wide initiatives (e.g., grant programs, research, protocol expansion, legal structures, incentive management, financial architecture design, and more).

  • UAC: The UAC manages DAO-specific, short- and medium-term initiatives (e.g., operational coordination, deployment management, community engagement, governance facilitation, program accounting, budget distribution, and more). The UAC is also more interactive with chains and third-party service providers interested in working with the DAO.

III. Committee Chairs:

The UAC is composed of five individuals, each elected directly by the DAO. Members are selected from diverse organizations and professional backgrounds, ensuring a breadth of experience and perspective. Importantly, none of the committee members holds conflicts with DAO interest, nor have prior affiliations with one another, which present conflicts of interest with the DAO or its core stakeholders. This diverse, independent, and foundationally DAO-aligned and DAO-elected composition is critical to maintaining the credibility, neutrality, and trust required for the UAC to effectively serve its mandate on behalf of the Uniswap DAO.

IV. Responsibility 1 – Communications:

Uniswap Foundation: The UAC serves as a neutral intermediary between the Uniswap Foundation and the broader DAO community, which it serves.

This intermediary role is essential for:

  1. Ensuring operational transparency

  2. Maintaining DAO confidence in UF activities via a high-context, third-party
    input, and…

  3. Enabling productive communication between the UF and DAO in a way that
    preserves confidentiality pertaining to sensitive matters

The UAC maintains regular communication with UF representatives, particularly through the Foundation Feedback Group (FFG) and other scheduled coordination mechanisms.
These communications are vital and structured to surface recurring community concerns, priorities, and sentiment, informing UF strategic planning and decision-making with bottom-up context.

  • Advisory: In this capacity, the UAC also provides advisory input to the UF, drawing on its unique vantage point within the DAO and its direct accountability to the DAO stakeholders.

  • DAO: The UAC actively engages the community through the governance forum, community calls, Telegram, and other accessible channels. This ensures the community remains informed, engaged, and empowered to provide feedback and participate in governance discussions at will.

  • Aggregation and Transmission: The UAC acts as a contextual translator and pipeline between DAO stakeholders, transmitting information to each counterparty in a structured and timely manner.

    • From UF to DAO: The UAC aggregates updates, initiatives, and progress reports from the Foundation which are reported to the DAO in community calls and forum posts.

    • From DAO to UF: The UAC collects questions, comments, and feedback from the DAO community and delivers synthesized community feedback to the Foundation through written reports and scheduled calls to inform the UF’s decision-making.

  • Builders and Third-Party Service Providers: In the absence of a point of contact and process facilitator, third-party actors (whether protocols, chains, or service providers) often face significant friction when trying to interact with the DAO.

    • From the builder’s perspective, this leads to:

      • Builder Attrition
      • Wasted Time and Resources and
      • Confusion.

    • From the DAO’s perspective, this lack of guidance lends toward:

      • Inconsistent engagement
      • Deficits of Oversight and Follow-Through, and
      • Opportunity Costs.

Due to its nature, detailed above, the UAC closes this gap by acting as a clear, DAO-sanctioned point of contact. It ensuring:

  1. Easy onboarding and clear guidance for external parties
  2. Transparency around engagements
  3. Defined KPI’s, accountability tracking, and follow-through, and
  4. Standardized, replicable practice for the third-party engagements
  5. Scope Efficiency, as the UAC engages with 3rd party service providers to ensure that proposals made to the delegate body are in scope, relevant, and worth attention.

V. Responsibility 2 – Community Steward:

The UAC serves as a community steward, facilitating direct engagement between DAO participants and ecosystem stakeholders. This includes:

  1. Hosting and moderating community events
  2. Facilitating discussions to ensure inclusive and productive dialogue
  3. Responding to requests from DAO members for public discussion spaces

At present, the UAC fulfills this role primarily through:

  1. Monthly Community Calls, open to all DAO participants
  2. Ad hoc events, initiated based on governance activity, stakeholder interest, or emergent needs
  3. 1:1 calls with delegates and community members as requested.

These efforts are designed to increase accessibility, promote participation, and support a stronger shared understanding across the DAO.

VI. Responsibility 3 – Governance Liaison:

DAO governance is often constrained by communication friction among its many distributed, pseudonymous, and asynchronous participants.

Common manifestations of this include:

  1. Inability to raise timely concerns or alarms
  2. Difficulty promoting ideas or solutions
  3. Redundancies in effort or overlapping initiatives
  4. Loss of historical context or institutional memory
  5. Loss or underrepresentation of valuable contributions, particularly from newer or less-resourced voices.

To ameliorate these pitfalls, the UAC serves as a platform and spotlight to surface, structure, and elevate community-generated insights and proposals.

  • Crowd Sourcing and Open Access: The UAC maintains an open-door policy both for direct communications with its members as well as through its hosted community calls to aggregate insights and context from the community.

  • Platforming / Spotlighting: Once aggregated, the UAC compiles and presents all crowdsourced data and perspectives for broader community feedback and engagement. This can be done both through formal forum posts, research reports, and community calls.

  • Proposal Guidance: When ideas sourced from the community show potential for formal governance action, the UAC serves a facilitatory role in their packaging and publishing as a proposal. In this way, the UAC lowers the barrier to entry for effective governance participation while enhancing the quality and diversity of inputs considered by the DAO. This can be done either through:

    • A UAC-constructed RFC-to-proposal pipeline or
    • Through assisting the original idea creator through the proposal process and community awareness.

In its capacity as a governance liaison and facilitator, the UAC commits to principles that ensure integrity, neutrality, and trust within the DAO. Entrustment with this Responsibility comes with an obligation toward generally ethical stewardship practice consistent with, but not limited to:

  • Confidentiality: To ensure maximal communication, it is essential that DAO participants feel assured in their interactions with the UAC. The Committee treats shared information (particularly proprietary products, business concepts, or novel ideas) with care and discretion. As such, ownership of novel concepts, ideas, and products shared and entrusted to the UAC remains with the sharing party. Disclosure and distribution of this information will be done with respect for and coordination with the sharing party.

Note: this specifically applies to products and business concepts, and does not apply to problem statements and/or matters of critical significance to the safety and stability of the DAO.

  • Non-Conflict and Impartial: The UAC aims to represent the community-sourced solutions entrusted to it by builders in good faith. The UAC will assess, platform, and present all material and information absent conflict of interest or ulterior intent. The UAC’s role in this capacity is not evaluatory, discretionary, judgmental, or decision-making. In discussing proposed solutions, the UAC’s goal is to neutrally distribute information, offer counterfactuals, steelman arguments, and constructive counterpoints as needed, to facilitate deeper dialogue and holistic evaluation. Ultimately, the DAO then decides.

  • Opinions: The UAC retains the right to hold and share opinions as deemed best for the DAO. However, any statement made by the UAC is strictly for conversational facilitation unless specifically stated.

These guardrails support the UAC’s mandate to foster a healthy, inclusive, and trust-based governance environment. The UAC’s legitimacy derives from its commitment to serving the DAO and steering it in collaboration with other delegates.

VII. Responsibility 4 – Operations:

As alluded to above, various operational tasks are best undertaken by a trusted, neutral single point of contact. This is conducted by the UAC on an as-needed basis, and historically has primarily been around matters of Uniswap deployment across various chains.

  • Deployment Facilitation: In particular, the UAC fills the gap in chain deployments. Uniswap Labs (UL) has limited bandwidth and stringent size requirements around which chains it supports on the primary Uniswap UI. This leaves a large swath of chains unaccounted for. It is strictly better for the DAO, however, that these unaccounted chains deploy the Uniswap protocol, and do so in a compliant and standardized fashion. This is where the UAC has stepped in. The UAC works with these non-UL partnered chains in conjunction with 3rd party UI providers to facilitate Uniswap deployments, transfer contract ownership to the DAO, and ensure all processes are done in a standard, timely, and proper fashion. The UAC also keeps a record of all of the official contracts and publishes them on the recognized ENS subdomains.

  • Liquidity Incentives: Along with deployments, the UAC is tasked with facilitating chain onboarding package proposals on a case-by-case basis to ensure that once the Uniswap protocol is deployed in a new EVM environment, the new chain is able to present itself to the DAO in the proper light. The UAC members often sponsor such proposals due to proposal threshold restrictions. These chains are guided through the governance process to reduce their operational overhead. Chains often require connections to other service providers, like distribution partners and ALMs—the UAC also aids in coordinating these collaborations.

  • Fund Escrow and Program Oversight: The UAC serves as the DAO’s primary escrow group, responsible for securely receiving, holding, and disbursing treasury funds in accordance with governance decisions. Acting as the execution arm for approved proposals, the UAC manages UNI transferred from the treasury’s timelock, ensuring that resources are delivered to the appropriate recipients, such as service providers, working groups, and grant programs, only after proper authorization. For example, between September 2024 and April 2025, 28,459,760 UNI was sent out of the Uniswap timelock, with 550,823 UNI specifically allocated to DAO-led programs, escrowed by the UAC. This role is critical to maintaining the operational flow of the DAO, as evidenced by the fact that 10 of the 12 on-chain votes executed during this period involved fund transfers directly to the UAC (while the other 2 went to the UF). Funds are sent to designated recipients upon production of receipts disclosing the completion of agreed-upon work or KPI fulfillment. Below is a list of “Accounts Programs” that the UAC manages/has managed—this list is growing season-over-season:

    • Onboarding Package (includes distribution fees, distribution integration costs, FE integration/management, incentives for distribution)
    • Delegate Rewards Program
    • UAC Payroll/Operations
    • Delegate Reward WG
    • DAO-Funded Grants (e.g., Tally, Forse)
    • Uniswap Treasury Working Group (UTWG)
    • Uniswap Growth Program/UEII

  • Accounting & Reporting: The UAC is tasked with maintaining financial records and providing transparent reporting on all funds under its stewardship. This includes tracking the receipt, custody, and disbursement of treasury assets, documenting the purpose and recipients of each transfer, and reconciling balances across multisig wallets. The UAC compiles these records into periodic public reports, such as its seasonal reports to the governance forum, detailing the inflows and outflows of funds, the status of ongoing financial commitments, and any rebalancing or budget adjustments required. These reports also include operational updates, such as the number of deployments overseen, governance calls hosted, and ancillary activities conducted during the reporting period. Tools like SafeNotes are also used by the UAC for perpetual transparency pertaining to multisig transactions.

The UAC’s operational role within the DAO is non-exhaustive and expanding/contracting based upon DAO needs and requests.

VIII. Responsibility 5 – Research:

The UAC leverages its strong vantage point within the ecosystem and credible neutrality to conduct and present research reports as needed. Research outputs are designed to be actionable, impartial, and relevant to current or emerging DAO priorities. These may include, but are not limited to:

  1. Systemic risk identification (e.g., quorum fragility, voting bottlenecks)
  2. Governance innovation (e.g., viability of new structures, delegation models, incentive design)
  3. Strategic analysis (e.g., comparative benchmarking of Uniswap against peer DAOs and protocols)
  4. Operational evaluations (e.g., Foundation performance, grant efficacy, tool ecosystem mapping)

Research initiatives may be initiated:

  1. In response to DAO requests
  2. As a proactive measure by the UAC
  3. As a byproduct of stakeholder conversations or observed needs

These reports serve to support informed governance, reduce information asymmetry, and strengthen the DAO’s position across internal and external domains.

IX. Responsibility 6 – Trusted Multi-Signer:

A common requirement within various DAO initiatives and proposals is payment dispersal and SAFE management. Rather than instantiating a new committee for each instance, the DAO has entrusted the UAC to serve as the multi-signer team for any form of monetary distribution and accounting.

X. Responsibility 7 – Treasury Management (UPCOMING ROLE):

Due to the conclusion of the Uniswap Treasury Working Group (UTWG) in December 2024, the UAC will assume responsibility for advancing the UTWG’s work by facilitating the establishment of a formal treasury management initiative for the DAO.* The UTWG’s primary contributions centered on researching and surveying potential approaches to treasury management, with 2024 governance feedback showing broad support for pursuing such efforts. With the future DUNA framework, the DAO has greater flexibility to implement organized and professional treasury strategies. Leveraging its stronger capitalization and operational mandate, the UAC will develop and run an RFP process, coordinated with the DUNA’s ministerial agent, to engage qualified treasury managers. This initiative will prioritize sustainability and growth by diversifying a portion of the treasury out of UNI and into a low-risk portfolio, such as a “Stability Fund,” ensuring more predictable financial resources for the DAO’s long-term objectives.

The UAC will be tasked with constructing the RFP, soliciting a diverse set of potential vendors, coordinating with key entities like the DUNA’s ministerial agent & administrator, providing vendors a fair chance at reaching delegates, and overseeing the governance process for the selection of a treasury manager. It is not necessarily the case that the UAC will be the oversight body for the treasury manager; such a key role may require the establishment of an alternative council.

*Any members of the UAC who are associated with a TM team will be excluded from organizing the RFP to prevent COI.

XI. Responsibility 8 – On-Call As-Needed Tasking:

The above document is non-exhaustive, and the role is regularly evolving. The UAC remains on-call to serve the DAO as the DAO sees fit.

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