Coin Governance System

Uniswap funds DAO incentive improvement project

The project will provide at least three proposals for Uniswap incentive mechanisms by June.

Financial modeling platform Gauntlet has been awarded a grant from Uniswap Foundation to improve DAO incentive mechanisms, according to an announcement from Gauntlet.

Gauntlet describes itself as a “crypto-native financial risk management solutions provider.” It uses economic models to optimize fees and rewards for decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, according to the announcement. The company is creating a new division, Gauntlet Applied Research, which will specifically focus on problems related to the growing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) ecosystem.

In its announcement, Gauntlet said that it would provide three pieces of research to UniswapDAO. The first will be a quantitative framework that the DAO can use to evaluate the success or failure of the Uniswap protocol. The second will be an analysis of trader and liquidity provider behavior, and the third will be at least three proposals for incentive mechanisms to allow the DAO to achieve its goals.

Gauntlet said that it expects all three of these deliverables to be completed by June.

Devin Walsh, executive director of Uniswap Foundation, expressed hope that Gauntlet’s research will help to improve not only the Uniswap protocol but also the crypto ecosystem as a whole, stating:

“One of our goals at the Uniswap Foundation is to build long-term relationships with the most talented and values-aligned teams in the space, and work with them on the most complex and interesting questions facing the Uniswap Protocol.”

DAOs have become a basic feature of the crypto economy over the past few years, with DAO analytics provider DeepDAO currently listing over 2,300 existing DAOs. Most DAOs are governed by tokenholders, who are allowed to vote directly on the blockchain to support or reject proposals for changes to a protocol.

However, token-based DAO governance has also been criticized by some industry experts, including Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin, who stated that this system could lead to “vote-buying” and “outright attacks.”

Over the past few months, some DAOs have attempted to provide better incentive mechanisms in the hopes of preventing vote-buying attacks. For example, MakerDAO passed a constitution on March 27 to formalize governance processes and provide checks and balances to prevent concentration of power.

Wormhole wins second ‘temp check’ to become bridge for Uniswap governance

Wormhole got over 60% of the vote in the Uniswap DAO referendum, with LayerZero coming in second.

The Uniswap DAO has approved a second non-binding proposal, called a “temperature check,” to make Wormhole the official bridge for cross-chain governance of the protocol between BNB Chain and Ethereum, according to the official proposal page.

The proposal will now become part of a final plan to deploy Uniswap v3 to the BNB Chain, which will go up for a binding governance vote at some point in the future.

Wormhole was up against three rival bridge solutions in the DAO’s referendum: LayerZero, deBridge and Celer. It got a clear majority with 62.31% of the vote. LayerZero was second with 37.58%, while DeBridge and Celer each got less than 0.1%.

This is the second time the Uniswap DAO has attempted to reach consensus on the choice of bridging solutions. On Jan. 21, the DAO voted in a temp check to deploy Uniswap v3 on the BNB Chain and to utilize Celer bridge to handle cross-chain governance votes. However, even before this vote had finished, some community members had started to express security and centralization concerns regarding the Celer bridge.

Related: DeFi auditor gets $40,000 for identifying Uniswap vulnerability

On Jan. 27, DAO members began voting on this second temperature check to decide specifically on the choice of bridge, with the understanding that the decision to deploy to BNB chain had been settled in the previous vote.

The Solana-Ethereum version of Wormhole was hacked in February 2022, allowing the attacker to gain $321 million worth of crypto in one of the largest decentralized finance exploits ever. However, the Wormhole team replaced the Ether (ETH) in the bridge to reimburse users, and the BNB-Ethereum version of the bridge doesn’t seem to have been affected by the exploit.

LayerZero was recently the subject of controversy, as a rival developer accused the bridging protocol of having security vulnerabilities. The LayerZero team has rejected the accusation, claiming it is misleading.