Uniswap Foundation: Summary Q3’2024 Financials

1

Continuing with our series of financial transparency updates to the community, the Uniswap Foundation is excited to post the unaudited summary financials for the quarter ended September 30, 2024.

Assets on Hand and Projected Funds Usage

On September 30, 2024 we had $33.83 million in USD and stables on hand and UNI 0.61 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: a total of $24.72 million was allocated towards grants. $17.33 million to be committed in 2024 and 2025 and $7.39 Million was reserved for grants committed previously, to be disbursed. The remaining $9.11 million was to be used to fund operations expenses through the end of 2025.

1208×704 31.6 KB

Q3’2024 Grants Committed and Disbursed

In Q3’2024, the Foundation committed $5.32 million in new grants and disbursed $1.49 million in committed grants.

724×700 45.1 KB

Q3’2024 Commitments and Disbursements Detail

1600×782 275 KB

Year to date September 30, 2024, $12.66 million in grants were committed and $6.78 million in funds disbursed. Q1’2024 and Q2’2024 financials, including grant commitments and disbursements, and operating expenditures are available to view here and here.

Q3’2024 Summary of Activities

In Q3’2024, the Foundation accrued $1.6 million in operating expenses, excluding employee token awards in UNI. YTD September 30, 2024 operating expenses were $4.13 million. The Foundation also realized $0.35 million in Other Revenue: Dividends and Interest in Q3’2024 and $0.54 million YTD.

1250×682 52.6 KB

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: includes directors and officers insurance.

In the following financial update post, we will continue with Q4’2024 and summary FY’2024 results, including grants commitments and disbursements, operating expenses and summary of financial position. 2023 unaudited financial summary is available here.

4 Likes
2

I would appreciate some more details on the payroll + contractors (~75% of Ops budget). How many effective full-time employees are being hired/retained and their purpose (eg grant/project performance monitoring). This need not be public (if it breaches commercial confidentiality) but the chain for the transactions should be visible to the UAC for independent verification. (think akin to CBO)

2 Likes
3

Out of curiosity, can you provide some more context around the Cooley: Governance Committee Legal Entity Exploration for $240K and the Blockful: Uniswap Governance Security Audit for $110K?

4

Thank you for your question. As reported, payroll was 52% of ops spend and represented 11 full time staff salaries, as well as relevant taxes and benefits. The functions of employees included executive leadership, growth, developer relations, governance, marketing and operations roles. Contractors and professional fees were predominantly legal and external accounting fees - at 24% of ops spend.

5

AD_4nXcLnzkppTJI79rtOfonAFQeCNFNPQV_Wg2eFDoeW8YeNFTCyLU90GWOBI8oDsGatzUswdWnWMLQL1KTM_zyEvLKj1aKWtL_0L4Tvjk6LBe1xivqFp8t_KBSjb4RFsI6jx34TdyQBqjaSodsbQbZymZbyZ63
AD_4nXcLnzkppTJI79rtOfonAFQeCNFNPQV_Wg2eFDoeW8YeNFTCyLU90GWOBI8oDsGatzUswdWnWMLQL1KTM_zyEvLKj1aKWtL_0L4Tvjk6LBe1xivqFp8t_KBSjb4RFsI6jx34TdyQBqjaSodsbQbZymZbyZ631250×682 52.6 KB

6

Hey Natalia,

Hope you’re doing well! I had a couple of questions about some of the details:

  1. Can you clarify what the “Incentives” category is about?
  2. Is there any chance we could get more info on the grants (like who the recipients are and what the scope is)? I think this is something we used to get, and it would really help us as DAO delegates to track the grantees and raise any questions if the objectives aren’t being met.

Thanks a lot for keeping things transparent!

7

The Cooley grant is related to work by the law firms Cooley and Placehodlr that analyzes potential regulatory, civil and tax liabilities of participants in the Uniswap ecosystem and provides a series of practical and structuring recommendations to attempt to address potential liability. The work is being subsidized by the UAGP under its open contribution grant category. While some of the work is attorney-client work product, we intend to make some of the findings and form documents public.

The Blockful grant is research into the technical and social attack vectors that face Uniswap governance. It will result in a report describing the risks they discover as well as mitigations and response plans for attacks that stem from those risks. Additionally, Blockful will build and host a dashboard to track the onchain metrics that drive the risks they define, and publish the indexing tools they developed for their analysis under an open source license. More details on the Blockful grant will be published in a Grant Announcement on the UF’s Mirror account soon.

8

Thanks for the transparent report, @nataliara!

As @drllau_LexDAO mentioned, we are also interested in the details of the salaries. We would like to know the average salary for each job category and whether the salary amounts (including the UNI token incentives) are appropriate within the employee budget.

Additionally, as @pepo mentioned, we would like to know more about the evaluation of the grants. If there are reports on each of the grants or an overall evaluation of the grants, it would be great to share them with the community. We will closely monitor articles from the Mirror account too!

1 Like
9

Thank you for your inquiry regarding grant information transparency. The Uniswap Foundation is committed to enhancing our communication about grants.

With regards to Incentives, in its initial funding request, the UF reserved funds from its innovation budget for testing and implementing different types of incentive programs (see here). Since then, we have worked with Gauntlet to design these programs and measure their success. We’re excited to continue that work with campaigns for V4 and Unichain, and will share more details when they’re finalized.

Grant recipients are provided in the “Commitments and Disbursements” chart under “Grant Name.” Grant summaries are available on our Uniswap Foundation Mirror page, and our latest Ecosystem Impact Report, outlining progress and key performance indicators, can be accessed here.

We will be sending a monthly newsletter after each community call to summarize new grant commitments. Additionally, we have lowered the threshold for detailed memos from $250K to $100K to increase transparency and are working on updating those memos for Q3. We will also continue to provide semi-annual Ecosystem Impact Reports that offer a comprehensive overview of grant performance.

We appreciate your interest and feedback as we strive to improve our communication and transparency.

1 Like
10

We are a small team and are unable to provide department averages as the averages would be too revealing for departments which are often 3 individuals or fewer. To set compensation for a given role, our internal policy is to benchmark salaries against market rates using at least two to three sources for the position for both the base compensation and token incentives. Our goal is to be competitive in our negotiations, as we seek out top talent, while ensuring we stay within a range appropriate for the role. This approach helps us make informed decisions about compensation based on job responsibilities, required skills, and industry standards to attract and retain top talent while also effectively managing our expenses.

The most recent Ecosystem Impact Report, outlining grant progress and key performance indicators, can be accessed here.

1 Like
11

Whilst this is not a senate confirmation, a question to the Uniswap Accountability Board is under what circumstances can the wider community (or their delegates) have a vote-of-no-confidence in the performance of any salaried individual? (could extend to subcontractees if the treasury gets working). This is not an issue for selection of candidates (which is an internal process for UF) but in feedback on actions (or lack of) which may be long-term detrimental to the principles. For example excessive reliance on grantees to be “honest” when project skills should be in-house for more complex progress evaluation (eg milestone payments)

1 Like