Uniswap DAO Advances $111 Million Program to Boost Governance Participation

The community behind the decentralized exchange Uniswap has voted to allocate $111 million worth of UNI tokens to large and active but underrepresented delegates.

In a preliminary “temperature check” vote, about 60% of Uniswap’s governing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) voters approved the proposal, sending it to a full vote for implementation.

Uniswap has $3.8 billion in total value locked (TVL) across 34 chains, according to DeFiLlama. In February, Uniswap Labs launched Unichain, a DeFi-focused Layer 2 blockchain built on the Optimism Superchain.

This would be Uniswap’s second treasury delegation program. The goal of the programs is to keep delegates involved with the DAO and voting. An analysis of the first treasury delegation program found the “program has been essential to keep governance healthy and retain the active and capable delegates,” the proposal said.

The original 2024 treasury delegation program was launched because of low voter participation from the large delegates in 2023. While it's working well, the authors of the latest proposal said they think “that the current governance is not stable yet, thus we think it’s worth considering and evaluating an expansion of the program.”

Larger Delegations

The original delegations will be withdrawn and replaced with a larger delegation of 18 million UNI tokens from the treasury. A dozen top delegates will get one million UNI, and the top six will get an additional one million. The first delegation program assigned 10 million UNI to seven delegates.

The new proposal will contain an 18-month end date to the round two delegation, as opposed to the open-ended program in the first round. Delegates will be evaluated quarterly to ensure they are participating as required.

Uniswap’s UNI token has had a rough year, dropping 57% from $14.28 at the beginning of the year to $6.21 today.

The new treasury delegation program would require selectees to have had a minimum of 80% voting participation rate for three months and a minimum of an 80% justification rate.

“The motivation is that a delegate’s primary responsibility is not only to vote on behalf of their delegators but also to provide a clear, reasoned explanation for each vote,” the proposal reads. “This transparency helps the community understand the basis for decisions, reassuring them that the vote was carefully considered and aligned with community interests.”