We are (and I specifically am) opposed to this amendment. Having spent months designing this system, we believe that the current implementation provides most of the benefits described above while maintaining the credible neutrality that is a core tenet of Uniswap’s value proposition and minimizing the technical risk presented by future V3FactoryOwner or UniStaker upgrades.
UniStaker can be used as a building block for new incentive models in a risk-mitigated way. Contracts can be built on top of it and funded with treasury UNI to steer votes and rewards to novel incentive protocols. In the case where there are multiple of these incentive protocols running at the same time, each could be spun up or down by a governance vote without impacting the audit surface area of the core system contracts (which in my mind are the contracts that allow protocol fee collection, conversion, and distribution). This is not the case if these experiments were to be run using setOwner(). In that case, the entire system (V3FactoryOwner and UniStaker) would need to be re-written, re-audited, and re-deployed. Our system actually enables easier experimentation.
If we were to adopt this amendment, each time that base-level contract infrastructure changed it would present technical and implementation risk that is not negligible. And it’s not a “lack of trust in governance” that leads me to this belief, it’s looking at a long history of very sharp teams writing and implementing upgrades and subsequently being hacked (i.e., Nomad). A V3FactoryOwner or UniStaker that rewarded multiple stakeholders in different ways would have a necessarily complex internal accounting system. Each time one aspect of this system changed (say, gas rebates for swappers) the others would be at risk.
Finally, as Leighton points out, the ability to change these contracts introduces rug risk for token holders and ecosystem builders. Uniswap has historically shipped immutable smart contracts to prioritize user safety and credible neutrality. If those are values we want to move away from, that’s a conversation we can have, but we should be very open about the fact that it is a departure. I do not personally want to move away from those values, because I believe they will be what drive our long term success.