As Uniswap’s ecosystem has grown, the Uniswap Foundation has identified an opportunity to support future innovation of the Protocol itself and to strengthen feedback loops between our stakeholders and protocol development. Today, we are announcing the creation of two new funding categories, Protocol and Security, which will be endowed with ~$4.7M through 2024.

At Uniswap Foundation, we're committed to building an ecosystem to enable global value creation. This mission has driven us from the beginning of the Foundation in 2022, guiding us towards creating a more inclusive and accessible financial system. We've focused on bringing in researchers and developers, strengthening governance, and facilitating innovation within the Protocol. This is a collaborative effort across 12 team members, more than 50 delegates and over 100 grantees.

The Uniswap Protocol itself is core to all of this work. It is what our developers build on top of, what our researchers contribute to, and what our delegates govern. As Uniswap’s stakeholder groups have grown in size and ambition over the past several months, we identified an opportunity for the UF to leverage our Innovation budget to serve them even better by focusing specifically on future protocol development and security.

With that, we're excited to announce the next step in our journey: the creation of Protocol and Security grants categories. These new workstreams are meant to ensure the continued innovation of the Protocol and complementary infrastructure, to strengthen feedback loops between the ecosystem and Protocol development, and to support its security.

Why Protocol and Security?

By dedicating more resources to Uniswap protocol development and security, we are excited to contribute to the broader ecosystem in many ways:

• Support continued Protocol development and innovation. This means supporting the future evolution of the Uniswap core protocol, as well as funding and guiding the development of complementary protocols and supporting infrastructure. Our strategy will allocate funds towards development with the goal of improving core user experience: reducing execution cost and latency, while exploring other opportunities to further create value for all stakeholders. We plan to both provide support to existing protocol developers, and to bring new teams into the fold.

• Strengthen feedback loops between our stakeholders and protocol development. As more teams commit to building and working on the Protocol, it will become increasingly important for strong feedback loops to be built between them and protocol development teams. In other words, these new grants categories will serve to support and strengthen the stakeholders served in each of our other categories.

• Maintain trust in the Protocol. This means funding audits, bug bounties, and other events and initiatives to ensure the security of the Protocol and its supporting infrastructure. As one of the most used codebases in crypto, the UF feels a responsibility to uphold our reputation for reliability and security.

Budget and Objectives

Earlier this year, we announced Uniswap Foundation’s evolved grants strategy where we shared specific objectives and budgets for 2024. Demonstrating our commitment to innovation and safety, we've updated our grants strategy for the remainder of the year. Below you can see that the Protocol and Security category will receive $2.6M and $2.05M respectively through the rest of 2024. These funds come from the Innovation category, which will still exist and continue to support the growth of the protocol more generally.

Moving Forward

By launching our Protocol and Security categories, we can better support our stakeholders. These initiatives lay the groundwork for long-term sustainability by ensuring that Uniswap continues to be a robust and viable protocol, prepared to adapt to future challenges and opportunities in the evolving DeFi landscape.