URGENT discussion on current vote: "Reduce UNI Governance Proposal & Quorum Thresholds"

Requests for Comment
42

I think your argument is flawed in multiple points. There are many people who would vote NO, but will not bother to do so as they see the proposal will not pass. Not voting in this case means voting NO.

For example, I know a couple of people who hold a significant amount of UNI which would completely counter your argument that the community is voting for this proposal and turn it upside down. They did not bother voting now as it is more or less very unlikely that the proposal will pass, but dont worry, people are watching.

5 Likes
43

I fear you are correct. My second last statement suggested as much, so i did see the flaw in my own argument.

What are we left with then? Despite our best attempts to create an ideology that democratizes decision making in a decentralized and permissionless manner. Instead, as you have just characterized, we have the kind of manipulation and scheming that is frankly no different from what i see in conventional politics.

My greater point has nothing to do with Dharma. It can be summarized as:

  1. This is all new and we have no idea what will work, but we have ideas!
  2. Create a governance meta-structure that allows us to experiment and adapt quickly in a tight feedback loop as we race toward ‘fit for purpose’ in our system

Making proposal and quorum constraints prohibitively high diminishes our ability to achieve #2, and our ability to maintain coherence in the rapidly moving world of crypto and it’s inherent complexity.

44

It’s important to keep in mind that Uniswap worked perfectly fine before governance was introduced.

I believe that, for now, governance is a liability rather than an asset to the decentralized nature of this protocol. We do not need to have constant rapid-fire proposals & voting to prove that governance works. A more cautious approach is needed.

Keeping a high threshhold is the right way to go, as long as we have tools such as Compound’s autonomous proposals that allow anyone to offer up an idea to the community in an attempt to garner support.

9 Likes
45

Just skipping over most of your post to the end: Uniqueness of identity is something of an open problem in governance. Because yes, it’s trivial to create additional wallets.

1 Like
46

I understand your sentiment but i would caution your approach.

“worked perfectly fine” is retrospective causality. DeFi has accomplished in 12 months what most initiatives take years to replicate. DeFi is the very essence of a highly complex and dynamic system. ‘Caution’ is anathema to what got us here. The torrid pace of innovation, in both tech and governance, is required to survive. So, we can politely disagree on this point. From what we have learned through the science of complex adaptive systems, staying at that edge of discomfort is an existential requirement. Seeking stability, caution, restrictive constraints, makes Uniswap highly prone to entropy. At this point, it doesn’t take the ‘next’ uniswap much energy to replace what’s there with a better service.

From what i can see as a consumer, if you can nail the following, Uniswap should do well:

  1. a better and more intuitive user experience to draw in a wider consumer base and accelerate adoption
  2. improved trust through some sort of decentralized governance that makes it ‘safer’ to invest - we are still in the wild west here and that scares the majority of consumers and institutions
  3. an institutional grade of financial instruments to ensure scalability, economy of use (gas fees!), security, and insurance. as long as ‘rug pull’ remains the dominant narrative amongst CT, good luck trying to draw in more capital. looking at DeFi charts in the last 2 months plainly demonstrates that we hit a glass ceiling.

The added layer of governance will help, and i would argue, is necessary to navigate the obstacles we know are ahead.

47

Speaking of DeFi, I was a Dharma app user and in the spirit of full decentralization, I expected the app to work the same way. However, it appears that their system kicks in some sort of KYC and there have been reports of users having their funds locked for no apparent reason. I see that Dharma delegates here are touting governance, when their own app is not supporting any principles of decentralization.

If Dharma wants this, they should pay something in return to the Uniswap community. Their surge fees is a price gouging scheme and hurts users more, despite claims made to the contrary i.e. friendly user interface.

As usual, assume positive intent in this dialogue.

4 Likes
48

I’m agree with uniswap controlling not to dharma

49

The current vote is not representative due to a couple of reasons.

  1. It is a Rider proposal. It means that it grabs the votes of people who want to reduce the proposal threshold while being neutral on lowering the Quorum threshold.

As there wasn’t even a topic on the forum focusing on lowering the quorum, it’s not a thing in the governance discourse, so more people are neutral.

  1. People who delegated their votes towards Dharma & Gauntlet can’t revoke their votes if they don’t support the proposal.

The current voting procedure fails at its primary purpose: people expressing their will.

If you delegated your votes to Gauntlet because they promised to be politically neutral, and now they vote in contradiction to their statement and against your will, there’s nothing you can do.

  1. Only votes that were delegated or self-delegated before the proposal can take part in the voting procedure.

It means that there’s no room to respond.

And the majority of voters had no idea about this system design .

==

Voters who hadn’t claimed their liquidity mining rewards yet can’t vote .

Voters who haven’t self-delegated (as there were no proposals) can’t vote .

Part of voters who delegated to the wrong candidate vote opposed to their will .

==

There are multiple severe flaws in the current voting procedure.

And Dharma & Gauntlet are trying to take advantage of it.

They take advantage of voters not being able to respond to their actions. And they try to take advantage of the way UNI is distributed while they can.

As I said earlier, it only makes sense to support what Dharma & Gauntlet do for people who are direct beneficiaries of the airdrop they try to push through.

They can only do that in the very early stages .

As later, more percentage of the supply will go to Liquidity providers, the team & investors, who have no interest in making said airdrop.

And airdrop is a euphemism, by the way.

The initial airdrop was an airdrop, and the team had reasons to do it the way they did.

Dharma’s ‘airdrop’ is closer to sending UNI from the governance treasury towards your addresses without doing anything useful to earn that. The adequate word would be stealing, as it comes at the expense of all other network participants.

It has nothing to do with Uniswap protocol development.

It is just an attempt to get free money & more voting rights.

And to get this free money, this group of interest is willing to compromise the protocol’s governance procedure.

7 Likes
50

The sheer gaslighting in this thread is staggering. Don’t be fooled, this quorum proposal is a DIRECT ATTACK against uniswap’s governance. Vote NO

4 Likes
51

Supporting the expressed concerns 100%. I feel a deep mistrust towards the proposal and voting system.
Please stop this now! Nearly noone will like the outcomes. It hurts uniswap governance.

  • Have a longer voting period. With much more open discussion beforehand.
    Look at EIP in Ethereum. A healthy discussion is needed!
  • Allow redirecting delegated anytime. Dont let people ‘be locked in’
  • Dont allow changes of “voting limits” in the upcoming year.
2 Likes
52

If anything we should vote to raise thresholds after this attack by Dharma

5 Likes
53

Thanks, uni0 for bringing this up. This is a clear vote - NO. It seems I missed the window to delegate.

1 Like
54

I was originally for this proposal as reducing the number of votes required to make a proposal is unlikely to be an issue. However, the second part of the proposal is much more troubling as it risks centralising Uniswap substantially.

No proposals being passed for a short while is better than a bad proposal being passed when the future of the largest Decentralised Finance project is at stake. I have only now enabled delegating so I wasn’t eligible to vote on this one. However, if this proposal was to come up again without the quorum reduction I would support it.

If anything this has shown how easy it is to reach around 30M votes (Almost all of these are from Dharma & Gauntlet), that in itself is a reason that I’d have to vote down a similar proposal if it contained the 2nd clause.

1 Like
55

If Dharma got 15 million UNI, why arent they distributing them direct to their users? Did they get them through the airdrop? Looks to me like Dharma is trying to double dip as well as take over governance.

2 Likes
56

All we have are promises and claims. How do we know how many “proxy” wallets they have for themselves? For all I know…decentralized protocols should be trustless and theirs a good reason for it. Passing this vote, and we are back to where we come from.

I am not buying into that narrative (morality, good will & so on) some try to spin here.

57

Its beyond obvious that this is a clear attack on governance. Its also be clear from the beginning that Dharma and company have been attacking this forum.

4 Likes
58

This might be a bit off-topic but relates to it. I noticed a few days ago, that UNI was added to compound with a very high APY. 57 adresses voted for it to pass. Gaunlet and Dharma among the TOP 3. This will lure users to deposit UNI, which can be borrowed to gain voting power. I rather propose to raise the bar for quorum instead of lowering.

2 Likes
59

Decentralized governance is a fantasy. As long as we have tokenized voting, the natural aggregation through delegation or economic pressure, is inevitable.

We should focus less on Dharma-Gauntlet and more on the governance structure. The problem we are addressing here, once averted through a failed proposal, will only happen AGAIN.

So, unless we enjoy meeting back here and vacillating the same argument over again, let’s instead focus on how to fix it. I’ll research this a bit more on the scientific front. Papers must have been written to recommend solutions. I’ll report back if i find anything.

60

raise the minimums for quorum to 5 or 6 %, fixed

61

found https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3082055_code2508452.pdf?abstractid=3082055&mirid=1

it’s short, but full of possibly useful references

will give it a read