Uniswap Foundation Becomes A Reality After An Amazing 86M Votes

Uniswap Foundation becomes a reality after an amazing 86 million votes in favor of it. The foundation will streamline the Uniswap grant program in order to reinvigorate governance.

The $74 million plan for a new Uniswap Foundation was proposed by two former Uniswap Lab executives. The Uniswap Foundation becomes a reality after receiving over 99% of the votes from UNI token holders.

The foundation intends to simplify Uniswap’s Grant Program (UPG) and eliminate friction in the protocol’s governance mechanism, according to the initial proposal.

Former Uniswap Labs CEO Devin Walsh, who is now the executive director of UF, tweeted the findings on Aug. 24, adding that the plan to establish the foundation had “passed its final vote!”

Last night our proposal to create the Uniswap Foundation passed its final vote!

🦄🦄🦄https://t.co/B2VOAeg5is

— Devin Walsh (@devinawalsh) August 24, 2022

According to the Uniswap website, the proposal received more than 86 million votes, or 99% of total votes cast, with just 770 votes cast against it. The votes in support come despite the fact that the first idea elicited varied reactions from the community when it was revealed on August 5.

The voting period began on August 17 and ended on August 24 at 2:19 p.m. GMT +10. Voting took place through Uniswap’s app, with voters required to have the UNI token in order to vote. A threshold of 40 million votes in favor of the UF was required for the vote to pass.

Walsh stated that the UF has already “hit the ground running” on its key goals, which include hiring “brilliant, values-aligned people,” expanding the UPG, and “reinvigorating governance.”

Employees wanted by the Uniswap Foundation include a Community Lead, Partnerships Lead, Governance Lead, Grants Analyst and Leads, Communications and Finance Leads, and Developer Relations and Protocol Leads.

Is It Decentralized?

Despite the overwhelming support for the UF, some on Twitter have questioned how much influence the community has over Uniswap decisions.

Chainlink Community Ambassador “ChainLinkGod,” who has 150,200 Twitter followers, claimed that rather than a centralized foundation, Uniswap’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) should choose how generated money is used.

The Uniswap DAO is also a joke in regards to decentralization theater, doesn’t exactly help your argument here, but at least they control $3.6B in UNI (largest DAO by AUM)

Typically it is the role of a DAO determine how funds raised are used, not a centralized foundation

— ChainLinkGod.eth 🌪 (@ChainLinkGod) August 20, 2022

Another member of the community indicated that the voting outcome was “whale run,” with the top 20 addresses voting with 81.57 million tokens, or 99.7% of the tokens utilized to vote in the proposal.

Uniswap has a history of passing fairly unanimous proposals. Today the community voted to accept a US$ 74mn expense to create the Uniswap Foundation (UF).

But….US$ 74mn is a lot of money…and was it really the community that voted this in?https://t.co/BeavvElVK3

— Ishita Srivastava (@ishita7077) August 24, 2022

Walsh, together with the new Head of Operations Ken Ng, intends to hire 12 people and has requested $74 million from the Uniswap decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasury, which presently contains over $3 billion in UNI tokens.

The UF intends to distribute $60 million of the $74 million to the Uniswap Grant Program (UGP) and the remaining $14 million to fund operating expenses.

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