A blockchain-focused student organization from the Harvard Law School has published its first pitch on the Uniswap governance forum.
Named ‘Harvard Law School Blockchain and FinTech Initiative‘ (HLSBFI), the group published a delegation pitch along with a description of their core values. If they wish, UNI holders can decide to transfer their voting power to the student group. HLSBFI shared the announcement on February 5.
According to the Harvard student organization, their mission at Uniswap is to promote education and career-developing opportunities.
These opportunities are directed towards students who are interested in industries such as blockchain and finance. Seeing the tremendous growth of Uniswap, they have decided to spearhead innovation and provide insight on governance proposals.
In the past weeks, HLSBFI worked on a list of core values that forms the basis of their decision-making process. The list includes a number of points, including long-term value creation, fairness, education, maintenance of Uniswap’s original mission, diversity & inclusion, transparency, and independent decision-making.
All points work towards growing the central ethos of cryptocurrencies, such as inclusiveness and decentralization. The group does not plan to approve fraudulent proposals nor those that disproportionately benefit the proposal creator.
Moreover, the students wish to maintain the original mission of Uniswap and strengthen aspects such as permissionless access, security, and immutability.
Should Uniswap users delegate votes to the Harvard student organization?
Permissionless blockchain networks work in a completely opposite way as compared to centralized systems. All participants have equal powers, and there is no case of having one user stand above another.
Moreover, it is uncommon for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to feature representative voting systems. On that account, it is justified to see that certain people within the community are disgruntled with the student group’s proposal.
One user writing under the name of Keith complained in the comments, sarcastically stating that individual users are not ‘smart enough’ to vote themselves. He continues by saying that delegating power to organizations defeats the purpose of DeFi voting.
HLSBFI responded by stating that it would be ideal that everyone votes. However, the group believes that not everyone has the time to stay informed on critical issues. In that case, it would be best if busy users delegate their vote to those who they trust instead of letting their voting power go to waste.
Truth be told, there is no definite answer to whether delegating power is good or bad. Both arguments are fairly good, and it appears that there is no clear solution to this problem.
In an ideal world, every user on a protocol would vote on important issues and voice their concerns. However, many view projects like Uniswap purely as a short-term investment and have no interest in directing the project.
In the end, the entire discussion boils down to how each individual user feels towards this question. If there is freedom and decentralization and crypto, a user willing to delegate his power to someone else should be a possibility, and others should respect that choice.
As Defiye reported earlier, the UNI token experiences continual growth and has even increased 5 times in size in only 35 days.