Temp Check Snapshot here
Last Wednesday we posted in the forum to complete the initial funding of the UF. Since then we’ve been having really great, thorough discussions with delegates -- hearing your comments, answering questions, and receiving feedback.
Based on that feedback, we are making a few changes to our proposal. These are covered in the bullets below, and updated throughout our proposal.
Uniswap is critical infrastructure for a self-sovereign Internet, providing the liquidity layer for a flourishing world of tokens representing governance participation, community membership, the ability to participate in protocols, “real world” assets and more. It is critical financial infrastructure - providing a permissionless, credibly neutral alternative to the NYSE or SWIFT. It is an enabler of entrepreneurship, providing a liquidity platform for builders creating protocols and applications around the world.
We founded the Uniswap Foundation because we want to ensure that Uniswap is accessible for anyone in the world to leverage as permissionless financial and technological infrastructure for a long time.
How do we make that happen? A robust, diverse, and values-aligned ecosystem.
A strong ecosystem is a competitive edge. It expands a Protocol’s accessibility, increases its resiliency, and enables it to thrive in the face of ruthless competitive and market environments. It means more product and engineering talent driving the Protocol forward, into new markets with better user experience. It means values-aligned delegates who are able to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs of governance proposals. It means more serendipity, collaboration, and inspiration.
Looking across the crypto landscape it’s easy to see ecosystem strength as a competitive advantage. Ethereum is probably the best example. If Consensys and Ethereum’s earliest contributors were still the only teams building on and for Ethereum, it is easy to see a world where almost none of us would be here. Instead, Ethereum is one of the best places to build blockchain-based protocols and applications.
The UF is building the Uniswap ecosystem.
How are we doing that exactly?
1. Growing core Protocol metrics, specifically driving net new order flow to strengthen the Protocol flywheel.
2. Building a pipeline for innovation on the Protocol, with the goal of enhancing the experience of swappers and LPs.
3. Aligning incentives for stakeholders with long-term interests of the Protocol, turning Uniswap into a cockroach.
This approach will serve to increase Uniswap’s moat over time while ensuring it can adapt as tides change.
Below, we discuss what we’ve done so far, and how we plan to accomplish our goals in the future. Thank you for your support, as always. We wouldn’t be here without you. We’re grateful to have the opportunity to work with you in the coming years.
Below, we provide a summary of what the UF Grants program and our team directly has accomplished over the last year.
Growth
Innovation
Governance & Community
First, we want to provide an overview of our team:
Devin Walsh, Executive Director & UF Co-Founder
Ken Ng, Applied Research & UF Co-Founder
Elika Mahdavi, COO
Raphaela Sapire, Head of Growth
Tyllen Bicakcic, Head of Developer Relations
Erin Koen, Head of Governance
Federico Landini, Grants Manager
We’re also grateful to work with a number of contributors who are making an outsized impact.
Ben Basche, Hooks Strategy
Bethany Crystal, Grants Strategy
YJ, Grants Committee
Leander Capuozzo, Brand Experience
Juliet Chung, Grants Administration
Below I want to summarize some of the work our team has done outside of grants:
Growth & Innovation
Governance
Regulatory
We will continue to take a targeted approach to growing the Uniswap ecosystem, investing our capital and resources to fund and support projects and teams who will drive growth and strengthening of the ecosystem.
Below we cover several initiatives currently in flight, and upcoming over the next few months.
Through the end of 2023, we plan to:
Into 2024 and beyond, we want to offer insight into how we’re thinking about achieving our big goals.
We are requesting $46.2M in funds today.
This funding will last provide the UF with 2 years of runway. In total, $28.33M will go towards grants, and $13.6M ($11.4M and 508k UNI) will be spent on operations over this timeframe. We have added a 10% buffer to mitigate price volatility. On the day we post the governance proposal, we will request our funds in UNI, using 30-day-TWAP to convert our request.
Grants
Operations
Grants
With the addition of funds, the UF will have $30M outstanding in grants capital remaining to disburse.
Projected Team Growth
Over the next year, we plan to grow our Growth & Research, Grants, and Technology teams in order to realize our goals. Specifically, we plan to:
Operations
Additional Notes
Over the last year, the UF has spent $3.15M on ops and $5.4M in grants. We offer a few comments on these amounts below:
The UF will retain the need to receive governance approval via an off-chain vote for grants larger than $2M. For that vote, we will use the terms set for the Temperature Check -- a 5-day Snapshot poll with 10M quorum.
Tranche 1 Review
Last year in our Tranche 1 of funding, we requested 2,547,002 UNI with the goal of receiving $20M. However the price of UNI decreased over the 11 days between our request and when it hit our wallet, decreasing the UNI’s value to $17.3M.
Our Treasury Diversification policy is designed to prioritize capital preservation and risk mitigation. We also maintain a portion of our assets in UNI to offer as part of a compensation package to our employees, to align interests with that of the Uniswap ecosystem.
Funds will be split between Operations and Grants. Below we detail our methodology for diversifying our assets within these two categories.
For Operational funds, we will:
For Grants funds, we will:
This plan aligns our financial strategy with our core objectives, minimizing risk from market volatility to safeguard the foundation’s operations and grant-making commitments.
We are kicking off our Temperature Check vote today - you can vote here. This vote will last for 5 days. We will kick off our on-chain governance vote next week.
To get a more comprehensive review on our work thus far, take a look at the blog posts we’ve written over the last year:
Thank you to Jesse Walden, Hart Lambur, Alexis Gauba, and Julia Rosenberg for their support as advisors and multi-sig signers over the last year.
Temp Check Snapshot here
Last Wednesday we posted in the forum to complete the initial funding of the UF. Since then we’ve been having really great, thorough discussions with delegates -- hearing your comments, answering questions, and receiving feedback.
Based on that feedback, we are making a few changes to our proposal. These are covered in the bullets below, and updated throughout our proposal.
Uniswap is critical infrastructure for a self-sovereign Internet, providing the liquidity layer for a flourishing world of tokens representing governance participation, community membership, the ability to participate in protocols, “real world” assets and more. It is critical financial infrastructure - providing a permissionless, credibly neutral alternative to the NYSE or SWIFT. It is an enabler of entrepreneurship, providing a liquidity platform for builders creating protocols and applications around the world.
We founded the Uniswap Foundation because we want to ensure that Uniswap is accessible for anyone in the world to leverage as permissionless financial and technological infrastructure for a long time.
How do we make that happen? A robust, diverse, and values-aligned ecosystem.
A strong ecosystem is a competitive edge. It expands a Protocol’s accessibility, increases its resiliency, and enables it to thrive in the face of ruthless competitive and market environments. It means more product and engineering talent driving the Protocol forward, into new markets with better user experience. It means values-aligned delegates who are able to thoughtfully weigh the tradeoffs of governance proposals. It means more serendipity, collaboration, and inspiration.
Looking across the crypto landscape it’s easy to see ecosystem strength as a competitive advantage. Ethereum is probably the best example. If Consensys and Ethereum’s earliest contributors were still the only teams building on and for Ethereum, it is easy to see a world where almost none of us would be here. Instead, Ethereum is one of the best places to build blockchain-based protocols and applications.
The UF is building the Uniswap ecosystem.
How are we doing that exactly?
1. Growing core Protocol metrics, specifically driving net new order flow to strengthen the Protocol flywheel.
2. Building a pipeline for innovation on the Protocol, with the goal of enhancing the experience of swappers and LPs.
3. Aligning incentives for stakeholders with long-term interests of the Protocol, turning Uniswap into a cockroach.
This approach will serve to increase Uniswap’s moat over time while ensuring it can adapt as tides change.
Below, we discuss what we’ve done so far, and how we plan to accomplish our goals in the future. Thank you for your support, as always. We wouldn’t be here without you. We’re grateful to have the opportunity to work with you in the coming years.
Below, we provide a summary of what the UF Grants program and our team directly has accomplished over the last year.
Growth
Innovation
Governance & Community
First, we want to provide an overview of our team:
Devin Walsh, Executive Director & UF Co-Founder
Ken Ng, Applied Research & UF Co-Founder
Elika Mahdavi, COO
Raphaela Sapire, Head of Growth
Tyllen Bicakcic, Head of Developer Relations
Erin Koen, Head of Governance
Federico Landini, Grants Manager
We’re also grateful to work with a number of contributors who are making an outsized impact.
Ben Basche, Hooks Strategy
Bethany Crystal, Grants Strategy
YJ, Grants Committee
Leander Capuozzo, Brand Experience
Juliet Chung, Grants Administration
Below I want to summarize some of the work our team has done outside of grants:
Growth & Innovation
Governance
Regulatory
We will continue to take a targeted approach to growing the Uniswap ecosystem, investing our capital and resources to fund and support projects and teams who will drive growth and strengthening of the ecosystem.
Below we cover several initiatives currently in flight, and upcoming over the next few months.
Through the end of 2023, we plan to:
Into 2024 and beyond, we want to offer insight into how we’re thinking about achieving our big goals.
We are requesting $46.2M in funds today.
This funding will last provide the UF with 2 years of runway. In total, $28.33M will go towards grants, and $13.6M ($11.4M and 508k UNI) will be spent on operations over this timeframe. We have added a 10% buffer to mitigate price volatility. On the day we post the governance proposal, we will request our funds in UNI, using 30-day-TWAP to convert our request.
Grants
Operations
Grants
With the addition of funds, the UF will have $30M outstanding in grants capital remaining to disburse.
Projected Team Growth
Over the next year, we plan to grow our Growth & Research, Grants, and Technology teams in order to realize our goals. Specifically, we plan to:
Operations
Additional Notes
Over the last year, the UF has spent $3.15M on ops and $5.4M in grants. We offer a few comments on these amounts below:
The UF will retain the need to receive governance approval via an off-chain vote for grants larger than $2M. For that vote, we will use the terms set for the Temperature Check -- a 5-day Snapshot poll with 10M quorum.
Tranche 1 Review
Last year in our Tranche 1 of funding, we requested 2,547,002 UNI with the goal of receiving $20M. However the price of UNI decreased over the 11 days between our request and when it hit our wallet, decreasing the UNI’s value to $17.3M.
Our Treasury Diversification policy is designed to prioritize capital preservation and risk mitigation. We also maintain a portion of our assets in UNI to offer as part of a compensation package to our employees, to align interests with that of the Uniswap ecosystem.
Funds will be split between Operations and Grants. Below we detail our methodology for diversifying our assets within these two categories.
For Operational funds, we will:
For Grants funds, we will:
This plan aligns our financial strategy with our core objectives, minimizing risk from market volatility to safeguard the foundation’s operations and grant-making commitments.
We are kicking off our Temperature Check vote today - you can vote here. This vote will last for 5 days. We will kick off our on-chain governance vote next week.
To get a more comprehensive review on our work thus far, take a look at the blog posts we’ve written over the last year:
Thank you to Jesse Walden, Hart Lambur, Alexis Gauba, and Julia Rosenberg for their support as advisors and multi-sig signers over the last year.
https://gov.uniswap.org/t/governance-proposal-complete-initial-funding-of-the-uniswap-foundation/22020/4?u=abdullahumar
https://gov.uniswap.org/t/governance-proposal-complete-initial-funding-of-the-uniswap-foundation/22020/4?u=abdullahumar
0x9099a8Eb681Be7F799D79cFeaC5A2bf813B4Fe6b
0x9099a8Eb681Be7F799D79cFeaC5A2bf813B4Fe6b
