@Naught Charlie from Agora here. Appreciate your thoughtful message, you're right, even tho Agora's open-sourced, I've definitely dropped the ball on comms and reporting. We will strive to be more active going forward there, and I'd love to get your feedback along the way.

Thank you Erin and Devin for posting the metrics here:

Additionally - I agree with the stale delegate problem that you've pointed out, the lack of active participation both lowers the quality of discussions as well as it robs the opportunity from other contributors in the ecosystem who are eager to participate.

There's still much more to do in both governance and general ecosystem growth, and we're pretty excited about UF's vision of how it all drives towards building a robust and values-aligned ecosystem to ultimately grow the Uniswap Protocol.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of this proposal, and believe the Uniswap Foundation is providing the seeds of future growth.

First I believe it is healthy to air out my own conflictions on the economics of it all, the tiny nagging voice in my head:

As a liquidity provider for the main UNI pair I have been slowly disheartened over the past few years. I have looked forward to a fee switch even though it hits the % fee's I would receive. Why? Because I believe a DAO can only work if it is a sustainable organization, meaning that it is deriving its funding from the protocol; not at the detriment of its relatively smaller governance holders (ex. Nouns fork, and liquidity inflationary provisions seen on most protocols). I feel guilty writing this, as I want to hold my breath and hope for something to change in the next few years. However, I do admit frustration when I see that the fee switch cannot be figured out due to uncertainty; but then see Paradigm supported Friend.tech have no issues with collecting fee's right out of the gate.

I don't mean to put a damper on all the work Uniswap Foundation has done so far. I am excited to see what this next tranche means. I just am tired of all the carrot and stick waving. Everytime I see a proposal I just imagine my full range Uni LP eating the cost, smaller fees being attained due to individuals cashing out with narrow LP ranges, and a few individuals getting disbursements without a worry of the impact on future sustainability and smaller holders. All the while not getting a voice to actually vote with the Uni LP.

I have no doubt this proposal will pass regardless of what I say. So here is some feedback of the proposal provided:

TL;DR conference:

Start small, perhaps have it as a conference that coincides with another in close proximity. Discount for conference goers of the other conference, vice versa. Provide specific value adds to the other conference, while having own messaging and vision.

Tacklebox

Great idea, and thought this was a great opportunity to explore innovation in a more concise way. I can see this growing into its own bigger thing! Tackle Boxing on lake/pond retreat; fishing in the think tank.

Agora

The follow through with this was not very good. It created excitement initially with the idea that UNI tokens would be reallocated to more active governance participants. From what I observed the reallocation did not happen, or was not documented/communicated well. The NFT invitation incentivised mainly localised delegates who already were actively involved.

On a separate note: why does Dharma HQ still have 2.26 million delegated to them (5.64% quorum)/ are large VC's aware of where the allocations have been delegated to? There are many such cases of inactive delegations, shouldn't these be more aligned with active developers/participants/LPers etc? Where is there an attestation of where these delegations should/could go.

Stakeholders

What is the Uniswap Foundation's definition of a stakeholder? The word is used many times throughout the proposal. Is it those that have received grants? If its grantee's or developers what is the retention rate of the UNI going out to these stakeholders i.e. are they holding the stake? Are stakeholders those who received UNI delegation from Venture capital without having personal stake in?

Value

I understand wanting more allocation since UNI prices went down after the last allocation. This happening is more of a byproduct of UNI as a mechanism of funding being unsustainable i.e. the thumb of supply unlocked pressing upon diminishing demand. On the other side would the Uniswap Foundation give back allocation if prices were to go up?

Perhaps a better way of providing grants would be to provide grants in the form of governance delegation that slowly unlocks over x amount of years and only if actively voting/participating in governance. Better alignment than giving out grants for projects that end up not having a sticky user base/one off data analytic report. What is the incentive to keep UNI as a grantee if you know the funding is coming from your own holdings?

Good luck to the Uniswap Foundation; my two cents from a tiny voice

Hey Devin and the rest of the UF team, thanks for this detailed summary of your work and vision for the future.

Alice here, DAO member, Uniswap liquidity provider and Web3 builder. I really like your vision for future works to continue growing the ecosystem and I have two follow-up questions on that:

1. Is continued support for grant recipients something you are doing/plan to do? I think the work you are doing on onboarding new developers via hackathons and funding new projects is key for the ecosystem's growth. But, first-time "founders" often have a hard time navigating the challenges of going from PoC (hackathon project or MVP project) to a successful product. In the start-up space, accelerator and mentorship programs exist to address this issue and guide founders beyond the initial idea toward the creation of a sustainable project. I think having a light version of this for UF grant recipients and hookathon winners may help the community to create products that have an impact on the growth of the Uniswap ecosystem. To some extents, this is what Consensys did in Ethereum's early days to support products like MetaMask, Gnosis and Infura in their early days. Are you/do you plan to leverage your expertise and connections with industry leaders to continuously support grant recipients/hookathon winners?

2. Is collaboration with non-Web3 projects something you are considering? I see you are extensively collaborating with players in the Web3 ecosystem and that's great. But, since this is a 3/4-years-long plan, I'm wondering if there's a plan to both onboard "fresh ecosystem workforce" and to leverage other technologies to grow the Uniswap ecosystem. For example, I think a collaboration with something like Replit may be a strategic move as it could help developers write Web3-safe code (e.g. a sort of "autocorrect" with best practices for smart contract developers), while enabling the UF to access a large community of Web2 developers. Is this something you are considering for the longer term?

Thanks for your answers and thanks again for your work 💪

Also, big fan of your initiative to bring delegates together IRL!

@Naught Charlie from Agora here. Appreciate your thoughtful message, you're right, even tho Agora's open-sourced, I've definitely dropped the ball on comms and reporting. We will strive to be more active going forward there, and I'd love to get your feedback along the way.

Thank you Erin and Devin for posting the metrics here:

Additionally - I agree with the stale delegate problem that you've pointed out, the lack of active participation both lowers the quality of discussions as well as it robs the opportunity from other contributors in the ecosystem who are eager to participate.

There's still much more to do in both governance and general ecosystem growth, and we're pretty excited about UF's vision of how it all drives towards building a robust and values-aligned ecosystem to ultimately grow the Uniswap Protocol.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of this proposal, and believe the Uniswap Foundation is providing the seeds of future growth.

First I believe it is healthy to air out my own conflictions on the economics of it all, the tiny nagging voice in my head:

As a liquidity provider for the main UNI pair I have been slowly disheartened over the past few years. I have looked forward to a fee switch even though it hits the % fee's I would receive. Why? Because I believe a DAO can only work if it is a sustainable organization, meaning that it is deriving its funding from the protocol; not at the detriment of its relatively smaller governance holders (ex. Nouns fork, and liquidity inflationary provisions seen on most protocols). I feel guilty writing this, as I want to hold my breath and hope for something to change in the next few years. However, I do admit frustration when I see that the fee switch cannot be figured out due to uncertainty; but then see Paradigm supported Friend.tech have no issues with collecting fee's right out of the gate.

I don't mean to put a damper on all the work Uniswap Foundation has done so far. I am excited to see what this next tranche means. I just am tired of all the carrot and stick waving. Everytime I see a proposal I just imagine my full range Uni LP eating the cost, smaller fees being attained due to individuals cashing out with narrow LP ranges, and a few individuals getting disbursements without a worry of the impact on future sustainability and smaller holders. All the while not getting a voice to actually vote with the Uni LP.

I have no doubt this proposal will pass regardless of what I say. So here is some feedback of the proposal provided:

TL;DR conference:

Start small, perhaps have it as a conference that coincides with another in close proximity. Discount for conference goers of the other conference, vice versa. Provide specific value adds to the other conference, while having own messaging and vision.

Tacklebox

Great idea, and thought this was a great opportunity to explore innovation in a more concise way. I can see this growing into its own bigger thing! Tackle Boxing on lake/pond retreat; fishing in the think tank.

Agora

The follow through with this was not very good. It created excitement initially with the idea that UNI tokens would be reallocated to more active governance participants. From what I observed the reallocation did not happen, or was not documented/communicated well. The NFT invitation incentivised mainly localised delegates who already were actively involved.

On a separate note: why does Dharma HQ still have 2.26 million delegated to them (5.64% quorum)/ are large VC's aware of where the allocations have been delegated to? There are many such cases of inactive delegations, shouldn't these be more aligned with active developers/participants/LPers etc? Where is there an attestation of where these delegations should/could go.

Stakeholders

What is the Uniswap Foundation's definition of a stakeholder? The word is used many times throughout the proposal. Is it those that have received grants? If its grantee's or developers what is the retention rate of the UNI going out to these stakeholders i.e. are they holding the stake? Are stakeholders those who received UNI delegation from Venture capital without having personal stake in?

Value

I understand wanting more allocation since UNI prices went down after the last allocation. This happening is more of a byproduct of UNI as a mechanism of funding being unsustainable i.e. the thumb of supply unlocked pressing upon diminishing demand. On the other side would the Uniswap Foundation give back allocation if prices were to go up?

Perhaps a better way of providing grants would be to provide grants in the form of governance delegation that slowly unlocks over x amount of years and only if actively voting/participating in governance. Better alignment than giving out grants for projects that end up not having a sticky user base/one off data analytic report. What is the incentive to keep UNI as a grantee if you know the funding is coming from your own holdings?

Good luck to the Uniswap Foundation; my two cents from a tiny voice

Hey Devin and the rest of the UF team, thanks for this detailed summary of your work and vision for the future.

Alice here, DAO member, Uniswap liquidity provider and Web3 builder. I really like your vision for future works to continue growing the ecosystem and I have two follow-up questions on that:

1. Is continued support for grant recipients something you are doing/plan to do? I think the work you are doing on onboarding new developers via hackathons and funding new projects is key for the ecosystem's growth. But, first-time "founders" often have a hard time navigating the challenges of going from PoC (hackathon project or MVP project) to a successful product. In the start-up space, accelerator and mentorship programs exist to address this issue and guide founders beyond the initial idea toward the creation of a sustainable project. I think having a light version of this for UF grant recipients and hookathon winners may help the community to create products that have an impact on the growth of the Uniswap ecosystem. To some extents, this is what Consensys did in Ethereum's early days to support products like MetaMask, Gnosis and Infura in their early days. Are you/do you plan to leverage your expertise and connections with industry leaders to continuously support grant recipients/hookathon winners?

2. Is collaboration with non-Web3 projects something you are considering? I see you are extensively collaborating with players in the Web3 ecosystem and that's great. But, since this is a 3/4-years-long plan, I'm wondering if there's a plan to both onboard "fresh ecosystem workforce" and to leverage other technologies to grow the Uniswap ecosystem. For example, I think a collaboration with something like Replit may be a strategic move as it could help developers write Web3-safe code (e.g. a sort of "autocorrect" with best practices for smart contract developers), while enabling the UF to access a large community of Web2 developers. Is this something you are considering for the longer term?

Thanks for your answers and thanks again for your work 💪

Also, big fan of your initiative to bring delegates together IRL!

Hi Naught, thank you for your thoughtful comments, it’s appreciated. I remember you left some thoughtful comments and questions and on our initial proposal last year as well.

• Re: fee switch, I don’t disagree with you. Given that some delegates strongly support turning on the fee switch, while others have raised questions around compliance/tax concerns related to it, we spent a number of months in Q4 2022/ Q1 2023 working with advisors and our own legal counsel to understand what path forward we could recommend which could speak to both parties. We posted our follow ups here and here. Value creation, capture, and distribution to stakeholders will be a top priority for us going into 2024.
• TL;DR - Thank you for the feedback, we’ll take this into account as we continue to plan! We are planning to start the event small with a 150 attendees target. If its over-subscribed we'll plan to grow in 2025.
• Tacklebox - Thanks for the feedback here as well — We’ve already learned so much from this one event and excited to improve for the next iteration at Devconnect in November!
• Agora - We have done our best to keep our Twitter and Mirror blog updated with progress across initiatives like the Delegate Race, however we recognize this is an area we can improve on in the future. We have already increased our resource allocation to communications and marketing efforts for internal initiatives and grantees, which you can see in our recent campaign about Uniswap University.
  • a16z announced their delegations as part of the Delegate Race here. The remainder of our contributors requested for their delegations to remain anonymous, however we are working with Agora team right now to provide some updated data on delegation to delegates on the Agora platform and will post them here when that’s been completed (ETA tomorrow or Monday).
  • We agree on stale delegations, it’s something we’re aware of but have struggled to address completely given many delegators are anonymous. We have reached out to delegators we suspect have some stale delegation over the past several months, however that has not solved this issue. We welcome advice from the community on how else we might address this.
• Stakeholders - This is a great question! This is one diagram we’ve used to show all the stakeholder groups within the ecosystem. Here you can see that Developers are a broad stakeholder group for instance, which can be broken into more specific stakeholder groups.

• Value
  • Re funding - last year the UF requested and was approved to receive $74M, broken into two tranches. We received a first, smaller tranche last year and have returned to request the larger tranche this year. Our first priority in our treasury diversification is capital preservation, so we dollar cost average into primarily dollars and stablecoins to fund our runway and mitigate price risk.

Regarding governance approval over $2M, I see your point better now. Still I remain unconvinced. Crypto is moving quickly, but not that quickly.

• It's clear that some teams might find the process too cumbersone. However, some other teams might leave Uniswap for the opposite reason, due to the perceived favoritism and not enough transparency in giving out grants.
• I imagine the approval could take place via single off-chain vote, where the DAO approves a single specific grant, this should be relatively quick.
• A well-prepared grant that the UF supports should pass the snapshot vote. If the DAO votes against UF's choice, there's a bigger problem (non-confidence)! The main benefit from the process is increased transparency, which is needed by the whole crypto space.
• If a team can get $2M+ funding elsewhere, maybe they should. Good ideas for the Uniswap ecosystem often can get VC funding.
• If time is crucial, a smaller seed grant could be given to start work before the main grant is approved.

To compare, academic grant timelines can be many months or even a year. Still, many talented teams work with these rules.

First of all — UF is doing a great job! I believe that many will agree that UF has been a net positive for the space.

However, this is a significant request for this type of funding. And we're in a bear market, the tokenholders already suffer, so the expenses should be carefully balanced with the expected impact.

Some further thoughts / questions.

• You have defined vision but no concrete target KPIs in the proposal. Can you comment on that?
• Regarding "Projected Team Growth" - it's unclear why these new positions are essential to achieve the objectives. Are they all full-time roles? I think this category has potential for budget cuts.
• I'm particularly concerned about removing governance approval for grants larger than $2M. UF already has considerable autonomy in fund allocation for most scenarios. I can't imagine why going through governance for 2M+ grants is such a problem?
• Accountability in general - have you thought of some kind of oversight board / committee, or involving third party auditors? It's a large amount of $ for stakeholders with conflicting interests. The DAO, by its nature, can't realistically manage this oversight. Some delegation of responsibilities is required. I realize that even defining "good" outcomes is hard (defining KPI would help!) and there's no way how the oversight board itself can be guaranteed to be "neutral".
• If the market value of the provided UNI exceeds the requested dollar amount, do you have plans for the surplus tokens? Would you commit in advance to returning them to the treasury?

Conflict of interest: I'm a former grant recipient from the UF.

Hi Naught, thank you for your thoughtful comments, it’s appreciated. I remember you left some thoughtful comments and questions and on our initial proposal last year as well.

• Re: fee switch, I don’t disagree with you. Given that some delegates strongly support turning on the fee switch, while others have raised questions around compliance/tax concerns related to it, we spent a number of months in Q4 2022/ Q1 2023 working with advisors and our own legal counsel to understand what path forward we could recommend which could speak to both parties. We posted our follow ups here and here. Value creation, capture, and distribution to stakeholders will be a top priority for us going into 2024.
• TL;DR - Thank you for the feedback, we’ll take this into account as we continue to plan! We are planning to start the event small with a 150 attendees target. If its over-subscribed we'll plan to grow in 2025.
• Tacklebox - Thanks for the feedback here as well — We’ve already learned so much from this one event and excited to improve for the next iteration at Devconnect in November!
• Agora - We have done our best to keep our Twitter and Mirror blog updated with progress across initiatives like the Delegate Race, however we recognize this is an area we can improve on in the future. We have already increased our resource allocation to communications and marketing efforts for internal initiatives and grantees, which you can see in our recent campaign about Uniswap University.
  • a16z announced their delegations as part of the Delegate Race here. The remainder of our contributors requested for their delegations to remain anonymous, however we are working with Agora team right now to provide some updated data on delegation to delegates on the Agora platform and will post them here when that’s been completed (ETA tomorrow or Monday).
  • We agree on stale delegations, it’s something we’re aware of but have struggled to address completely given many delegators are anonymous. We have reached out to delegators we suspect have some stale delegation over the past several months, however that has not solved this issue. We welcome advice from the community on how else we might address this.
• Stakeholders - This is a great question! This is one diagram we’ve used to show all the stakeholder groups within the ecosystem. Here you can see that Developers are a broad stakeholder group for instance, which can be broken into more specific stakeholder groups.

• Value
  • Re funding - last year the UF requested and was approved to receive $74M, broken into two tranches. We received a first, smaller tranche last year and have returned to request the larger tranche this year. Our first priority in our treasury diversification is capital preservation, so we dollar cost average into primarily dollars and stablecoins to fund our runway and mitigate price risk.

Regarding governance approval over $2M, I see your point better now. Still I remain unconvinced. Crypto is moving quickly, but not that quickly.

• It's clear that some teams might find the process too cumbersone. However, some other teams might leave Uniswap for the opposite reason, due to the perceived favoritism and not enough transparency in giving out grants.
• I imagine the approval could take place via single off-chain vote, where the DAO approves a single specific grant, this should be relatively quick.
• A well-prepared grant that the UF supports should pass the snapshot vote. If the DAO votes against UF's choice, there's a bigger problem (non-confidence)! The main benefit from the process is increased transparency, which is needed by the whole crypto space.
• If a team can get $2M+ funding elsewhere, maybe they should. Good ideas for the Uniswap ecosystem often can get VC funding.
• If time is crucial, a smaller seed grant could be given to start work before the main grant is approved.

To compare, academic grant timelines can be many months or even a year. Still, many talented teams work with these rules.

First of all — UF is doing a great job! I believe that many will agree that UF has been a net positive for the space.

However, this is a significant request for this type of funding. And we're in a bear market, the tokenholders already suffer, so the expenses should be carefully balanced with the expected impact.

Some further thoughts / questions.

• You have defined vision but no concrete target KPIs in the proposal. Can you comment on that?
• Regarding "Projected Team Growth" - it's unclear why these new positions are essential to achieve the objectives. Are they all full-time roles? I think this category has potential for budget cuts.
• I'm particularly concerned about removing governance approval for grants larger than $2M. UF already has considerable autonomy in fund allocation for most scenarios. I can't imagine why going through governance for 2M+ grants is such a problem?
• Accountability in general - have you thought of some kind of oversight board / committee, or involving third party auditors? It's a large amount of $ for stakeholders with conflicting interests. The DAO, by its nature, can't realistically manage this oversight. Some delegation of responsibilities is required. I realize that even defining "good" outcomes is hard (defining KPI would help!) and there's no way how the oversight board itself can be guaranteed to be "neutral".
• If the market value of the provided UNI exceeds the requested dollar amount, do you have plans for the surplus tokens? Would you commit in advance to returning them to the treasury?

Conflict of interest: I'm a former grant recipient from the UF.

Hey Atis, thanks for your thoughtful questions.

First to your comment on the request.

• In our proposal we lay out our vision for the kind of opportunity that lies ahead for Uniswap - 100k’s of hook developers and app development teams building on Uniswap v4, the best researchers in crypto building POCs on Uniswap, and supporting the community in value capture and distribution. Each of these items requires a team to develop a thoughtful funding strategy and deploy a meaningful amount of capital. We fear allowing capital to sit in the treasury unused would mean stagnancy and missed opportunities, and an inability to recognize those opportunities. If we achieve even a small number our goals (with, for example, just one additional Uniswap Labs-type team generating considerable order flow/innovation for the protocol), we believe the benefits to the protocol and ecosystem would be far, far greater than the cost to the treasury.
• From a governance perspective, this funding was approved last summer by a vote in proposal 24. We’ve spent the last year building the operational base from which we can deploy this second tranche of those initially-approved funds. While we believe our track record shows our value to the ecosystem, we’ve been working with a smaller amount of capital - we have our sights on multiplying our results.

Re: KPIs, thanks for bringing this up!

We set internal OKRs on an annual basis, and then set quarterly specific KRs. A few of our strategic OKRs are below

OKR1 - 300 new developers building projects on Uniswap [This has already been achieved, we are at 325 with 2 more hackathons to go]

• A few examples of KRs include: Launching Developer documentation for v4, creating testnets and devtooling with Hardhat & Foundry, hosting Hookathons in NYC and Istanbul, working with grantees to create SDK documentation, and so much more!

OKR2 - Dedicate 100% of funding (grants, RFPs, fellows, etc.) to strategic programs and/or top quality grantees

• Some examples of KRs include: building out improved MENV mitigation strategies, building partnerships with at least 1 focused on MEV mitigation and capture in V4, and funding 8 fellows to conduct DeFi research through TLDR

OKR3: Onboard 3-5 delegates who are long-term- and values-aligned with Uniswap

• Examples include: running at least 1 IRL event for delegates, 0 errors in on-chain proposal creation and cross-chain deployments, completing the MMA audit, and introducing more resiliency into the MMA implementation

Looking forward to 2024, we will set our OKRs according to the three goals set out in our proposal (covered in this section) - many of the items listed may materialize in KRs. While these are directional - and may change as we finalize 2024 planning - I’m happy to share what we are thinking.

1. Growth - OKR tied to number of top-tier developers contributing over long-term (6-12+ months) to development of hooks ecosystem (docs, tooling, security standards, routers/aggregators, dev of public goods hooks and libraries).
2. Innovation - OKRs tied to outputs of applied research working groups focused on MEV mitigation and supporting experimental implementations of AMM research (i.e., technical specs, RFPs, or POC hooks across privacy preservation, ZKP integration, MEV profit distribution, and OFA designs).
3. Governance - OKR tied supporting governance in aligning on the mechanisms by which to capture and distribute value to ecosystem stakeholders (may entail turning on the protocol or Uniswap X fee switch). OKR tied to top-tier devs contributing new value creating infrastructure to protocol.

Re: Projected Team Growth

• Each hire ties to the strategic goals listed above.

1. Growth
   1. Developer Relations Engineer in order to assist in the design and management of grants and grantmaking programs to support the growth of hooks ecosystem
   2. Senior Product hire to assist in design and strategy for future development of protocol, supporting infrastructure, and hooks.
2. Innovation
   1. Head of Research to build research funding strategy and design strategic research-oriented grants and programs.
   2. Growth Hire to support scale of research and growth-related programs to increase impact. This hire will also allow current team Heads to shift their energy to leading our Governance / value capture efforts.

• Cutting across all 3 initiatives, we will hire a Grants Lead and a Grants Analyst to support the build out of longer-term oriented grants and strategically oriented grantmaking programs (ie ongoing programs designed to achieve a certain goal, rather than one-off grants), as well as manage relationships with grantees. We are not be able to do this with the 1 Grants team member we have today. Our Growth Hire will assist in our Marketing efforts to amplify the UF’s supoort programs and our grantees. We will hire an EA to support our team’s operations.

Re: Governance approval over $2M.

• We believe the UF should be held accountable to achieve its goals - which is why we return for funding from governance regularly. In the plan above, we will return to increase our Ops funding in mid-2024.
• However, we also need to be set up for success to achieve our goals - and balance our need for accountability with our need to move efficiently. Over the last year, we have seen the kind of time and effort that governance proposals require. To give a frame of reference, our Governance Lead facilitated an ARB funding proposal this past year which took 3 months from hitting the forums to approval. In less extremes scenarios, passing a governance proposal can take 3-4 weeks of time — to draft the proposal, communicate to delegates, answer questions, and rally votes to pass. This kind of timing and dependency upon funding delays our progress towards achieving the results we’ve set out to you, and may be a nonstarter to teams we believe would add value to the Protocol (reliance upon governance approval is nonstandard friction for many teams - and may cause them to seek capital and partnerships elsewhere).

Re: Accountability

• Another fair question. Our goal is to balance accountability to Uniswap governance with our ability to move quickly and efficiently like a startup. Right now, we believe relying upon for Uniswap governance approval for funds provides a sufficient check on our operations. The UF has provided transparency into our financials and our grantmaking over our last year in existence without an oversight committee. We have shown in the past, and here, that we answer all delegate questions with detail and honesty. We have done this because we know it’s a requirement to build trust with the community, as a foundation for your support.

Re: excess tokens

• Based on findings in our fee switch research, we believe sending UNI back to the treasury would put governance at legal and compliance risk related to tax.
• If the UNI token price increases while we diversify our assets into fiat and stables, and we end up with more capital than laid out in this proposal, we commit to spending the capital towards grants and operations at a similar breakdown to our current projections.

Hey Atis, thanks for your thoughtful questions.

First to your comment on the request.

• In our proposal we lay out our vision for the kind of opportunity that lies ahead for Uniswap - 100k’s of hook developers and app development teams building on Uniswap v4, the best researchers in crypto building POCs on Uniswap, and supporting the community in value capture and distribution. Each of these items requires a team to develop a thoughtful funding strategy and deploy a meaningful amount of capital. We fear allowing capital to sit in the treasury unused would mean stagnancy and missed opportunities, and an inability to recognize those opportunities. If we achieve even a small number our goals (with, for example, just one additional Uniswap Labs-type team generating considerable order flow/innovation for the protocol), we believe the benefits to the protocol and ecosystem would be far, far greater than the cost to the treasury.
• From a governance perspective, this funding was approved last summer by a vote in proposal 24. We’ve spent the last year building the operational base from which we can deploy this second tranche of those initially-approved funds. While we believe our track record shows our value to the ecosystem, we’ve been working with a smaller amount of capital - we have our sights on multiplying our results.

Re: KPIs, thanks for bringing this up!

We set internal OKRs on an annual basis, and then set quarterly specific KRs. A few of our strategic OKRs are below

OKR1 - 300 new developers building projects on Uniswap [This has already been achieved, we are at 325 with 2 more hackathons to go]

• A few examples of KRs include: Launching Developer documentation for v4, creating testnets and devtooling with Hardhat & Foundry, hosting Hookathons in NYC and Istanbul, working with grantees to create SDK documentation, and so much more!

OKR2 - Dedicate 100% of funding (grants, RFPs, fellows, etc.) to strategic programs and/or top quality grantees

• Some examples of KRs include: building out improved MENV mitigation strategies, building partnerships with at least 1 focused on MEV mitigation and capture in V4, and funding 8 fellows to conduct DeFi research through TLDR

OKR3: Onboard 3-5 delegates who are long-term- and values-aligned with Uniswap

• Examples include: running at least 1 IRL event for delegates, 0 errors in on-chain proposal creation and cross-chain deployments, completing the MMA audit, and introducing more resiliency into the MMA implementation

Looking forward to 2024, we will set our OKRs according to the three goals set out in our proposal (covered in this section) - many of the items listed may materialize in KRs. While these are directional - and may change as we finalize 2024 planning - I’m happy to share what we are thinking.

1. Growth - OKR tied to number of top-tier developers contributing over long-term (6-12+ months) to development of hooks ecosystem (docs, tooling, security standards, routers/aggregators, dev of public goods hooks and libraries).
2. Innovation - OKRs tied to outputs of applied research working groups focused on MEV mitigation and supporting experimental implementations of AMM research (i.e., technical specs, RFPs, or POC hooks across privacy preservation, ZKP integration, MEV profit distribution, and OFA designs).
3. Governance - OKR tied supporting governance in aligning on the mechanisms by which to capture and distribute value to ecosystem stakeholders (may entail turning on the protocol or Uniswap X fee switch). OKR tied to top-tier devs contributing new value creating infrastructure to protocol.

Re: Projected Team Growth

• Each hire ties to the strategic goals listed above.

1. Growth
   1. Developer Relations Engineer in order to assist in the design and management of grants and grantmaking programs to support the growth of hooks ecosystem
   2. Senior Product hire to assist in design and strategy for future development of protocol, supporting infrastructure, and hooks.
2. Innovation
   1. Head of Research to build research funding strategy and design strategic research-oriented grants and programs.
   2. Growth Hire to support scale of research and growth-related programs to increase impact. This hire will also allow current team Heads to shift their energy to leading our Governance / value capture efforts.

• Cutting across all 3 initiatives, we will hire a Grants Lead and a Grants Analyst to support the build out of longer-term oriented grants and strategically oriented grantmaking programs (ie ongoing programs designed to achieve a certain goal, rather than one-off grants), as well as manage relationships with grantees. We are not be able to do this with the 1 Grants team member we have today. Our Growth Hire will assist in our Marketing efforts to amplify the UF’s supoort programs and our grantees. We will hire an EA to support our team’s operations.

Re: Governance approval over $2M.

• We believe the UF should be held accountable to achieve its goals - which is why we return for funding from governance regularly. In the plan above, we will return to increase our Ops funding in mid-2024.
• However, we also need to be set up for success to achieve our goals - and balance our need for accountability with our need to move efficiently. Over the last year, we have seen the kind of time and effort that governance proposals require. To give a frame of reference, our Governance Lead facilitated an ARB funding proposal this past year which took 3 months from hitting the forums to approval. In less extremes scenarios, passing a governance proposal can take 3-4 weeks of time — to draft the proposal, communicate to delegates, answer questions, and rally votes to pass. This kind of timing and dependency upon funding delays our progress towards achieving the results we’ve set out to you, and may be a nonstarter to teams we believe would add value to the Protocol (reliance upon governance approval is nonstandard friction for many teams - and may cause them to seek capital and partnerships elsewhere).

Re: Accountability

• Another fair question. Our goal is to balance accountability to Uniswap governance with our ability to move quickly and efficiently like a startup. Right now, we believe relying upon for Uniswap governance approval for funds provides a sufficient check on our operations. The UF has provided transparency into our financials and our grantmaking over our last year in existence without an oversight committee. We have shown in the past, and here, that we answer all delegate questions with detail and honesty. We have done this because we know it’s a requirement to build trust with the community, as a foundation for your support.

Re: excess tokens

• Based on findings in our fee switch research, we believe sending UNI back to the treasury would put governance at legal and compliance risk related to tax.
• If the UNI token price increases while we diversify our assets into fiat and stables, and we end up with more capital than laid out in this proposal, we commit to spending the capital towards grants and operations at a similar breakdown to our current projections.