Uniswap Foundation gets green light after 99 percent of the community casts their vote in favour of the initiative

After getting mixed reactions from the community earlier, the proposal passes the final hurdle following voting on Wednesday

  • Published:
  • 26/08/2022 05:48 PM

Image: Shutterstock

Two former Uniswap Lab executives launched a $74 million plan to form a new Uniswap Foundation, and it is well on its way to becoming a reality after a massive 99 percent of votes on their proposal by Uniswap holders. Devin Walsh, one of the people behind the proposal, shared the results in a tweet, saying that it “passed its final vote!”. The foundation aims to streamline Uniswap’s Grant Program (UPG) as well as decrease conflict in the protocol’s governance system.


According to the Uniswap website, the foundation proposal saw upwards of 86 million people in support while only 770 people seemed to be in disagreement. This is a huge turnaround from early August when the initial proposal was put out since it received largely mixed reactions from the community.

The voting, which started on August 17 and ended on Wednesday, was conducted on Uniswap’s app. The eligibility criteria for voters was that they needed to hold UNI in order to cast their vote, and a threshold of 40 million votes required for the proposal of UF to move forward.


Walsh commented that the UF has already “hit the ground running” on its top priorities, which includes interviewing “talented, values-aligned candidates” to join the team, scaling up the UPG and “reinvigorating governance.” As part of the first priority, the UF’s job board indicates that they are hiring for community lead, partnerships lead, governance leads, grant analyst and leads, communications and finance leads, and developer relations and protocol leads positions.

Despite the impressive amount of support for the Uniswap Foundation, some people are apprehensive about how much control the community actually has on Uniswap decisions. ChainLinkGod, the Chainlink community ambassador, joined the conversation on Twitter, saying that Uniswap’s decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) should “determine how funds raised are used” rather than the shots being called by a centralised foundation.

Meanwhile, another Twitter user is of the opinion that the voting outcome was a whale run, saying, “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?”

Despite some of the community’s reservations online, Walsh seems to be moving ahead, with the head of operations Ken Ng starting to build a team of 12 people. They have also requested $74 million from the Uniswap DAO treasury to fund their activities, with a projected $60 million to go over to Uniswap Grant Program and the remaining $14 million to expense for the operating budget of the foundation. The Uniswap treasury currently holds over $3 billion worth of UNI.

Uniswap has come a long way since its inception in November 2018, becoming the world’s largest decentralised exchange by trading volume and supporting upwards of $1 trillion in cumulative volume. To add on to the list of achievements, its daily volume is often at par with that of Coinbase.

The writer is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash