Uniswap – the leading DEX – has seen its first governance proposal from Dharma to reduce quorum and proposal thresholds earlier today.
1/ We have made the first proposal to @UniswapProtocol‘s new governance system: Reduce UNI Governance Proposal & Quorum Thresholds
TL;DR: We propose a threshold of 3m UNI for proposal submission (down from 10m), and 30m UNI as quorum (down from 40m).https://t.co/MDZkTfwMYt
👇
— Dharma (@Dharma_HQ) October 12, 2020
There have been critiques of the high amount of UNI required to submit governance proposals since early September, but this is the first official move by any known party to try and address the issue. UNI holders can vote for or against Dharma’s new proposal here. Voting ends approximately October 19, 2020, 11:09 AM PDT.
The proposal looks to shift two key components, namely the quorum and proposal threshold as follows:
- Reduce quorum – or the total percentage of the supply which must vote on a proposal to pass – from 40M UNI (4% of the supply) down to 30M UNI (3% of the supply)
- Reduct proposal threshold – or the amount of UNI needed to make a proposal – from 10M UNI (1% of the supply) down to 3M UNI (0.3% of the supply)
These two steps combined are geared at making it easier for more users to make proposals while requiring a lower quorum theoretically means that more proposals should pass. We saw a similar approach taken by yearn when they reduced quorum, a common signal that sometimes high quorum can actually prevent valuable proposals from going through giving the common voter apathy in DeFi and crypto at large.
This is a significant step forward for decentralized exchange as it’s the first signal that the team’s efforts towards decentralization through token distribution is working as intended. It’s worth mentioning that the first-ever Uniswap governance proposal was created by an entity outside of the Uniswap core team.
The UNI Token
A few weeks back, Uniswap revealed it’s native governance token UNI on September 16th. The launch made waves through the DeFi community and beyond as the Uniswap team chose to retroactively reward users and liquidity providers of Uniswap along with anyone who had interacted with the Uniswap smart contracts.
Over 60% of all UNI tokens are allocated to Uniswap community members, while the first phase of liquidity mining program for UNI tokens is currently still live for another 34 days. The following pools will are incentivized with UNI rewards until November 17, 2020 –
- ETH/USDT
- ETH/USDC
- ETH/DAI
- ETH/WBTC
To learn more about becoming a liquidity provider for any of the above pools and earning UNI tokens, stake your liquidity here.
What’s Next
With Dharma leading the charge in creating the first-ever governance proposal and their usage of Uniswap for trading in their mobile app, it seems likely that the team will remain active in helping to shape Uniswap’s future. One interesting thing to pay attention to is that Dharma users who traded through the app have still not received what they believe to be their fair share of UNI tokens.
The UNI retroactive airdrop made many users happy but excluded proxy contract users like those on Dharma and Matcha. To join the discussion on this issue join the UNI governance forums here.
Follow Dharma and Uniswap on Twitter to keep up with the latest!
Business Development and Operations at TrustToken – TUSD. Jack is a startup generalist and DeFi enthusiast. Stay connected with him by following @HHJackSun on Twitter.