Uniswap

Summary

Despite being one of the most prominent DeFi protocols, Uniswap’s outstanding voting power does not necessarily translate into active governance participation. In fact, many top delegates with considerable voting power have less than 50% vote participation rate, and some even as low as 10% or 0%. While there have been previous campaigns to encourage delegation by large UNI holders, we have seen that further delegate accountability is needed as many of those who received large delegations barely participated, if at all.

In healthy governance environments, proactive delegates wield significant voting power, ensuring malicious votes are prevented and quorum requirements are met.

Therefore, this proposal requests the Uniswap Foundation delegate 2.5 million UNI to each of 4 active yet underrepresented delegates selected based on the criteria outlined below. To ensure further accountability, each delegate must maintain a 80% participation rate at a minimum (as explained further in Participation Requirements) or is subject to undelegation via the Franchiser contract explained below. In addition, there will 1 year term so the community can revisit for improvements and lessons learned. And if a received delegate is removed without fulling this 1 year term, the role won’t be filled.

Landscape of Uniswap Governance

Source: Butter

Despite numerous improvements to Uniswap’s governance, there are still several areas that require further improvement. One prominent area is governance participation, which has witnessed a downward trend compared to late 2022 and early 2023.

Another issue is many large delegates are now inactive, and the delegators who entrusted them with delegation are either unaware about this inactivity or simply do not care. For example, there is currently several delegates with more than 2.5 million UNI delegated who never even voted onchain according to Tally, see the screenshot below.

Source: Tally

Therefore, further distributing governance power to active but underrepresented delegates is a positive step forward ensuring governance is more active, resilient, and robust.

Participation Requirements

• Must have voted on 80% (or more) of proposals (minus the proposals that were canceled) over the last 3 months (as of the date when this proposal is passed on Snapshot). This includes both Snapshot and Onchain proposals (such as Tally or Agora)
• Must have actively participated in proposal voting for more than 3 months and have a Delegate Platform on Uniswap Forum under Delegation Pitch

Application Criteria

• Meets the above Participation Requirements
• Voting Power is less than 2.5 million UNI (as of the date when this proposal is passed on Snapshot).

Next Steps

• Should this proposal pass on Snapshot, a 5-day period will begin where delegates that meet the above criterias are encouraged to post their application to be considered for delegation. In cases where there are more than Four qualified applicants, there will be an additional Snapshot vote to determine the top Four. Once Four or fewer applicants are selected (in case there are not enough delegates that meet the criteria), it will proceed to an onchain vote.

Other Clarification

-The term will be 1 year from when 2.5 M UNI is delegated.

-Should the onchain vote be approved but there are three or fewer qualified applicants because there are not enough qualified applicants, there WON’T be a subsequent application period and Snapshot vote after the initial vote to fill the remaining available recipients.

-Should the onchain vote be approved and there are qualified applicants but one or more of them are disqualified in the future due to their low vote participation, there will NOT be a new application and snapshot vote to give the opportunity to another delegate.

-As mentioned by in a previous proposal seeking UNI delegation, there will be deployment of at max four new Franchiser contracts, each one funded with 2.5M UNI (10M UNI total). The owner of these Franchiser instance’s would be the Timelock, while the at max four delegates chosen through the voting process outlined above can act as the delegatees.