Uniswap Foundation: Summary Q1’2024 Financials

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Continuing with our promise to provide financial transparency to the community, the Uniswap Foundation is excited to post the unaudited summary financials for the quarter ended March 31, 2024.

Assets on Hand and Funds Usage

On March 31, 2024 we had $41.41 million in USD and stables on hand and UNI 0.73 million (in UNI). The fiat (USD) cash and stables are to be used for grantmaking and operating activities and the UNI for employee token awards. The expected runway was through the end of 2025 and was earmarked as follows.

Grants commitments and incentives: $25.77 million to be disbursed in 2024 and 2025. $2.94 Million was reserved for grants committed previously, to be disbursed. Remaining $12.7 million was to be used to fund operations expenses through the end of 2025.

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Q1’2024 Grants Committed and Disbursed

In Q1’2024, the Foundation committed $4.34 million in new grants and disbursed $2.79 million in committed grants.

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Q1’2024 commitments were based on the revised grants strategy. More detail on the updated grants strategy can be found here. You can also review some of the grants we have awarded thus far on our blog.

Q1’2024 Summary of Activities

In Q1’2024, the Foundation accrued $1.03 million on operating expenses*.

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Payroll expenses included salaries, benefits and taxes. Contract & professional fees included legal, accounting, technical audit, and consultant expenses. Office expenses included internal team events, such as offsites, software, transaction fees and other G&A. External events included conference and external event travel and attendance. Advertising & marketing included web design, agency fees, TLDR event hosting. Insurance: directors and officers insurance.

In the following financial update post, we will continue to share a snapshot of 2nd Quarter 2024 results, including grants commitments and disbursements, operating expenses and summary of financial position. 2023 unaudited financial summary is available here.

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How were UNI sold?

What was the reason why the Foundation wanted to support DEF via treasury instead of own grants if they are strongly supportive of it?

What’s the logic for supporting certain large grants via treasury while some grants are via UF’s own grant program?

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Can you please share a bit more information on the key grants/payments made in Q1 2024 and the following updates? For example, what were the governance grant commitments and disbursements made last quarter?

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Thanks for the update. Is it possible to see the summary in a planned expense vs realized expense format and some commentary when things don’t go according to plan?

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The UF received 10,685,985 UNI on 10/20/2023 based on a 30-day TWAP of $4.32. In the subsequent two weeks we worked with two respected crypto brokers to exchange 10,298,157 UNI for USD and USDC at an average price of $4.12. Our approach prioritized optimizing for best execution while minimizing our impact on the market.

These are good questions! There are two things which we believe are relevant here.
For one, there are multiple sources of funding for projects that want to build within the Uniswap ecosystem, and we believe that is a good thing. DEF made their own decision to go to the Treasury for funding. We expect other teams may go that route as their situations warrant. Still others may receive initial funding from the UF and then approach other sources, which may be VC funds, or the Treasury, for more. We believe this flexibility is a benefit to builders and the ecosystem at large.

Second, the UF’s funding strategy is focused on building and supporting specific stakeholder groups and themes detailed here and in subsequent blog posts. We are focused on funding developers, researchers, governance, innovation, and protocol/security. That means we are not focused on funding other areas, like political advocacy and policy, where the DEF is focused. We believe funding programs in these specific areas outlined will allow us to create the most value for Uniswap with the resources we’ve been granted from governance. By focusing, we are able to build true subject matter expertise and stronger networks in those areas, and devote capital to building relatively fewer but deeper, longer term relationships with a group of partners for the benefit of Uniswap as a whole.

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Ops Expenses were budgeted at $1.33M for Q1 versus $1.03M incurred. We have planned expenses towards the end of the year that will utilize the unspent budget from Q1. Though, note we are always looking to operate as efficiently as possible and if unused towards the end of the year, the budget will be used to extend the operating runway further. With regards to grantmaking, we are budgeting to commit $13.57M this year and have committed $4.34M through Q1’2024, or 32% of the budgeted amount. It should be noted that many grants are multi-year commitments. So while we are spending a slightly larger portion of our budget up front, many of these projects will last through at least the end of the year, and will benefit from continued support from our team. Lastly we will add, while we budget for the entire commitment up front, payments are disbursed on a milestone basis. And, we are able to cancel if milestones aren’t met.

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Here is further detail with regards to Q1’2024 grant commitments and disbursements. Commitments are new grants commitments, to be disbursed over milestones. Disbursed grants are milestone payments working towards total commitments.

You will find that commitments are consistent with the revised grant strategy as outlined here and here, which is larger, longer term, high impact grants. For every grant over 250K, we write a thesis memo, which lays out our rationale for funding. You can read our thesis about Allium DEX Analytics Portal, Gauntlet Routing Optimization, Atrium Academy Uniswap Hook Incubator, Cryptio LP Tax Tool, Agora, and EdgeCity / GovSwap on Mirror.

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