It's a go! Uniswap Foundation becomes reality after 86M votes in favor

The $74 million plan by two former Uniswap Lab executives for a new Uniswap Foundation has just become reality after their proposal received over 99% of the votes from UNI token holders.

According to the initial proposal, the foundation aims to streamline Uniswap’s Grant Program (UPG) and reduce friction in the protocol’s governance system. 

Former Uniswap Labs executive Devin Walsh, now serving as executive director of UF shared the results in a tweet on Aug. 24, noting that the proposal to create the foundation “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 foundation saw more than 86 million, or 99% of total votes in favor of the proposal, with only 770 votes against it. The votes in favor come despite the initial proposal seeing mixed community reaction when it was first announced on Aug. 5.

The voting period started on Aug. 17, and was cut off at 2:19 pm GMT +10 deadline on Aug. 24. The votes were conducted on Uniswap’s app, with voters needing to hold the UNI token in order to vote. For the vote to pass, a threshold of 40 million votes was needed to be cast in favor of the UF.

Walsh said that the UF has already “hit the ground running” on its top priorities, including interviewing "talented, values-aligned candidates" to join the team, scaling up the UPG and "reinvigorating governance."

According to the Uniswap Foundation's job board, employees they're looking to hire include Community Lead, Partnerships Lead, Governance Lead, Grants Analyst and Leads, Communications and Finance Leads, and Developer Relations and Protocol Leads. 

Decentralized or not? 

But despite the votes being cast heavily in favor of the UF, some on Twitter have questioned how much control the community actually has on Uniswap decisions.

Chainlink Community Ambassador “ChainLinkGod," who has 150,200 followers on Twitter, stated that Uniswap’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) should “determine how funds raised are used” rather than a centralized foundation.

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 community member suggested that the voting outcome was “whale run”, with the top 20 addresses voting with 81.57 million, or 99.7% of tokens used 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, along with now Head of Operations Ken Ng plans on building out a team of 12 and have requested $74 million from the Uniswap decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) treasury, which currently holds over $3 billion worth of UNI tokens.

Of the $74 million, the UF plans on distributing $60 million to the Uniswap Grant Program (UGP) and the remaining $14 million to cover the operating budget.

Uniswap is the world’s largest decentralized exchange (DEX) by trading volume. Since Uniswap’s inception in Nov. 2018, the protocol has supported more than $1 trillion in cumulative volume, with its daily volume often competing with that of centralized exchange Coinbase.