Uniswap DAO Approves Delegation Of 10M UNI To Active Voters

In a bid to combat low participation rates, the Uniswap DAO recently voted to delegate some UNI tokens held by the Uniswap Foundation to underrepresented delegates that maintain an 80% participation rate.

The proposal initially aimed to distribute 2.5 million UNI to 4 new delegates. However, after prolonged conversations, seven delegates were chosen to receive 10M UNI of voting rights. Roughly 18.5M UNI token holders participated, with over 17M in favor. The proposal must now be executed on-chain by UNI delegates.

The move comes at a time of dwindling activity across DAO governance structures amid a prolonged bear market, and the results might be a tell-tale sign that interest is beginning to return to the crypto space.

The UNI token has posted a 23% gain over the past seven days and a 50% jump over the month.

According to Doo Wan Nam, the COO of StableLab, a firm specializing in services and products for DAOs (which placed fourth in the vote), the fact that more delegates were elected than initially considered is “very positive,” adding that the vote was widely supported even by large delegates that weren’t going to benefit directly from the vote.

Such a result, he told The Defiant, “is not always the case across DAOs.”

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an organization governed by smart contracts and structured horizontally, with democratic decision-making processes usually determined by token-based voting.

Uniswap has been witnessing a consistent downtrend in governance participation. Towards the end of 2022 and throughout this year, the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) has seen a severe drop in the number of delegates voting on proposals.

According to a recent blog post by Doo, delegates of all sizes have dismal engagement rates, ranging from 0-10% all the way up to 50%. “In healthy governance environments, proactive delegates wield significant voting power, ensuring malicious votes are prevented, and quorum requirements are met,” he wrote.

DAOs across the board have suffered greatly from the prolonged bear market, and Uniswap’s DAO is no exception.

Although the exchange has had its fair share of launches this year, including Uniswap V4, along with the hyped appearance of its Android wallet, the platform still struggles to keep engagement from its community up to par.

Doo told The Defiantthat Uniswap’s downtrend is multifaceted but pointed at its fast growth as dampening delegates' participation in the long term. “As these organizations grow,” he explained, “there are many updates and topics to follow, and many simply don’t have the time or resources to do so.”