Today we are announcing the Uniswap Foundation’s second wave of grant disbursements!
This second wave of grants sum up to a total of ~$946K, awarded across 19 grants. The grants are spread across four categories:
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Protocol Growth, including grants to enhance existing tools like xToken Terminal and Seedle, and to make it easier to work with liquidity pools on testnets
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Research & Development, including research to improve user experience related to MEV and to incentivize additional integrations into the Protocol
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Community Growth, including grants to support multiple hackathons, to train engineers from diverse backgrounds, and to support onboarding tech-savvy girls into web3
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Governance Stewardship, including a new Uniswap governance interface and two analyses related to the fee switch vote
We are also particularly excited to highlight three grants: Uniswap Agora, Lanturn: an MEV Estimator and Prototype, and Pursuit.
First up is Uniswap Agora, built by the Agora team. Agora is working to improve the Uniswap governance experience in order to help it attract the best, and most engaged delegates, and to enable effective and efficient decision making. Uniswap Agora will be a fully-fledged governance interface that facilitates governance participation through the enablement of new features such as delegate platform pages and liquid delegation. (They previously built Nouns Agora for Nouns DAO and recently launched ENS Agora for ENS)
Another grant we’d like to highlight is Lanturn, an MEV Estimator and Prototype being led by Professors Ari Juels and Farinaz Koushanfar. This work will allow swappers to better predict whether MEV will occur, and to what extent they will be impacted, prior to executing a transaction on Uniswap. In turn, it will help users reduce trading costs. Developer tooling will also be built to allow engineers to understand, pre-deployment, the impact of MEV on their users, and to adjust smart contracts to reduce their exposure.
Lastly, we’d like to highlight Pursuit, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that trains adults from underrepresented and low-income communities to get their first tech jobs, advance in their careers, and become the next generation of leaders in tech. They are creating a fully open source Solidity course that will train new web3 engineers to contribute to the ecosystem at large. Pursuit has helped more than 650 adults from low-income diverse backgrounds find jobs at leading tech companies, including in web3 (i.e., Pinterest, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Celo, Helium) over the past 7 years, and we’re so excited for them to bring their program to the web3 ecosystem.
Of course - these are only 3 of many amazing grants which we have recently disbursed. Read on to learn more about all of them!
Protocol Growth
Liquidity Pool Provisioning on Testnets
This grant will create a plugin that automatically deploys and maintains liquidity pools on an Ethereum test or local development environment. These pools will already have liquidity provided, allowing developers to easily simulate different scenarios. A Hardhat plugin with a Uniswap charts interface will make these new functionalities easily available.
Grant Size: $55,000, across 5 disbursements
Impact: Addresses a pain point for developers looking to test on or with liquidity pools in a test or local environment. Today, projects involving liquidity pools are cumbersome to test - often entailing a manual deployment of your own router, token factory, libraries, etc. This enhancement will make that process significantly easier.
Recipient: Cooper Brown. Cooper has spent the past 2 years working on DeFi protocols as a developer, and prior to this, he has built several successful SaaS productivity platforms.
xToken Terminal UniV3 LP Position Rebalancer
This grant supports development of xToken Uni-v3 LP Rebalancer, which will allow users to reposition their liquidity in one transaction rather than the current method of three separate transactions. The tool will guide users through selecting new liquidity ranges; once that is ready, it will remove liquidity from the old position, swap assets to satisfy requirements for the new range, and create a new liquidity position for the user.
Grant Size: $50,000, across 3 disbursements
Impact: This will significantly improve the LP experience. It not only simplifies three transactions into one, it also automatically calculates optimal reserves for the new position.
Recipient: xToken Terminal, one of the most popular solutions for launching liquidity mining incentives on Uniswap v3. The xToken team consists of experienced builders, and is led by founder Michael Cohen.
Seedle
This grant will support the further development of Seedle, a popular LP analytics and management tool for LPs which has 3,000 unique users and ~100 LPs actively managing positions. The team will add a more detailed liquidity position view, new liquidity position actions, and a token discovery tool. LPs will now be able to view time spent in a specific range, track fees earned over time, easily collect and reinvest fees, discover pools for tokens, and more.
Grant Size: $38,640, across 4 disbursements
Impact: A more comprehensive feature set for LPs will help onboard more new LPs, and to improve the experience of experienced LPs as they monitor and adjust their positions.
Recipient: Seedle. Lakshan and Elliot began building Seedle with a UGP grant in Spring 2021. They have worked together in product development and design for several years. Lakshan has been LPing since Uniswap v1!
Enhancements to Arbitrum Subgraph
This grant will fix an existing issue with Uniswap’s Arbitrum subgraph in which it does not provide liquidity range information. The grantee will add an optimization to the calculation of liquidity range statistics which will allow the subgraph to efficiently calculate, store, and provide that information to interfaces, including for pools listed in the info.uniswap.org Arbitrum pool site.
Grant Size: $4,000, across 2 disbursements
Impact: Liquidity range information is available in subgraphs across all deployments except for Arbitrum, meaning that interfaces using subgraphs cannot show the distribution of liquidity for a given pool on that deployment. This new information will improve the LP experience on Arbitrum.
Recipient: Aditya Agarwal. Aditya is a distributed systems developer turned web3 developer. He began work on this project at the Devcon Arbitrum Hackathon (also funded by the UF), and has worked to complete it in subsequent weeks.
Research & Development
Lanturn: MEV estimator research and prototype
This grant will fund the research into and development of an MEV estimation prototype. The prototype would anticipate for users the probability of whether MEV will happen, as well as the likely impact of the MEV, prior to executing a transaction on Uniswap. It will do the same across smart contract functions for a developer prior to deployment. To accomplish this, the team will develop new machine-learning techniques to scale the Clockwork Finance Framework (CFF) to sustainably provide correct bounds on MEV at scale.
Grant Size: $200,000, across 2 disbursements
Impact: As many readers know, MEV continues to be an issue across the DeFi ecosystem. By better understanding the potential impact of MEV across contracts, users will be able to reduce their exposure and trading costs, and developers will be able to modify smart contracts to improve user experience.
Recipients: Ari Juels and Farinaz Koushanfar, supported by a team of academic groups working under each of them, respectively. Ari Juels is a Computer Science Professor at the Jacobs-Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion and a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell University. He is also a Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts and Chief Scientist at ChainLink Labs. Farinaz Koushanfar is an Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor at UC San Diego.
Pricing Orderflow Research
The original Uniswap Foundation proposal contemplated a large allocation from the grants program to fund novel incentive programs, as well as an R&D budget to design and specify those programs. This is the first of such grants. This research is focused on designing and articulating a formula which might be used to provide incentives to interfaces to drive order flow directly to the Uniswap protocol.
Grant Size: $24,000, across 2 disbursements
Impact: The Uniswap ecosystem will be equipped with a quantitative thesis on how these kinds of incentive programs might impact the Uniswap Protocol and its various stakeholders.
Recipient: Xenophon Labs. Xenophon Labs, started by Max Holloway, is a web3 research company that focuses on mechanism design; Xenophon Labs has completed research grants for other large DeFi protocols.
Community Growth
Pursuit
This grant will support the development of a completely open source Solidity course that is specifically built to onboard engineers from diverse backgrounds, enabling them to eventually contribute to leading crypto protocols. Pursuit has helped more than 650 adults from low-income diverse backgrounds find jobs at leading tech companies, including within web3 over the past 7 years.
Grant Size: $250,000, across 4 disbursements, pending matching contributions obtained from other web3 ecosystem sponsors
Impact: Lowering the barrier to entry into web3 for underserved adults and communities will not only benefit their future career prospects, but also increase the diversity of talent, thought, and innovation in the industry.
Recipient: Pursuit, a 501(c)(3) non-profit which provides adults with the engineering skills they need to find work at top-tier technology companies
Miss O Cool Girls
This grant will support the creation of a comprehensive web3 educational hub focused on empowering girls with all the resources they need to dive into DeFi and web3 at large. In addition to content creation and distribution, the grant will support the Girls Who Mint Fund, which onboards women and particularly young girls into web3 with $100 worth of ETH to mint their first NFT.
Grant Size: $46,000, across 3 disbursements
Impact: There is currently a lack of educational materials and onboarding platforms focused on young and teen girls. This platform will focus on ensuring a more inclusive and diverse future for web3 by teaching the basics of DeFi, NFTs, and crypto more broadly to girls at a young age.
Recipient: Miss O Cool Girls (MOCG), a web3 company founded by Juliette Blake and Hermine Brindak. MOCG is part of the Miss O and Friends brand, which was founded by Juliette 15 years ago to create a fun, safe, and empowering space for girls online.
ETHSan Francisco
This grant supported ETHGlobal’s ETHSan Francisco hackathon, adding to the pool of $300K in rewards. The hackathon took place in early November and hosted a multitude of workshops from respected teams and experts in the industry to equip hackers with the proper infrastructure. Check out the three winning Uniswap projects here: UniV3LeveragedCrab, Fungible V3 LP, and easyLP.
Grant Size: $40,500, in 1 disbursement
Impact: Bringing together hundreds of developers to learn how to build on Uniswap, and to develop novel integrations and interfaces.
Recipient: ETHGlobal. ETHGlobal is a leader in organizing conferences and hackathons focused on the Ethereum community.
ETHBogota
This grant supported ETHGlobal’s hackathon at Devcon, adding to the pool of $300K in rewards. The hackathon took place at Devcon and taught hackers about Foundry, Scaffold-ETH, the Graph, and other tools to accelerate web3 development. SLiP (Short Liquidity Pool) was a winning Uniswap project.
Grant Size: $25,000, across 1 disbursement
Impact: Bringing together hundreds of developers to learn how to build on Uniswap, and to develop novel integrations and interfaces.
Recipient: ETHGlobal. ETHGlobal is a leader in organizing conferences and hackathons focused on the Ethereum community.
UCSB-ECON DeFi Seminar
This grant sponsors weekly seminars on DeFi research, hosted by UC Santa Barbara. These weekly seminars, held until the end of the academic year, builds a community focused around DEX and DeFi-focused academic research.
Grant Size: $15,000, across 3 disbursements
Impact: Support and educate academics interested in entering the DeFi space.
Recipient: Regents of UC Santa Barbara, Nir Chemaya and Dingyue Liu. Nir and Dingyue are both Ph.D. candidates in the department of economics, whose research interests include macroeconomics, blockchain, decentralized finance, and behavioral economics.
Arbitrum Hackathon (Devcon, Colombia)
This grant supported Arbitrum’s hackathon the weekend following Devcon, adding to its total reward pool of $140K. At the hackathon, engineers built projects focused on the Uniswap deployment on Arbitrum. The aforementioned “Enhancements to Arbitrum Subgraph” grant was started at this Hackathon.
Grant Size: $10,000, in 1 disbursement
Impact: Bringing together hundreds of developers to learn how to build on Uniswap, and to develop novel integrations and interfaces.
Recipient: Offchain Labs. The team behind Arbitrum, one of the leading layer 2 solutions within the ecosystem that aims to be a scaling solution for Ethereum contracts.
Uniswap Vibes
This grant will support ten editions of “Uniswap Vibes”, a periodic publication that summarizes the events happening in the Uniswap ecosystem, covering on-chain metrics and community activity. Dan Fisher, the author, has already completed 4 editions.
Grant Size: $5,000, across 2 disbursements
Impact: Quality content is important for the Uniswap community to be properly updated with Uniswap news and performance, allowing the community to drive more insights and make informed decisions when need be.
Recipient: Dan Fisher. Dan is a full time content writer and marketer of all things Ethereum related.
Uniswap Monthly Financials
This grant aims to create a consolidated overview of the state of the Uniswap Protocol on all networks, presenting data similar to those of traditional financial reports. These reports will include the analysis of protocol revenue, fees collected, and treasury expenses.
Grant Size: $3,000, across 2 disbursements
Impact: These monthly reports will allow the community to easily keep up with the state of the Uniswap treasury, cash flows, and overall Protocol financial health.
Recipient: Adalhi Abderrahman. Adalhi is an active contributor to Asymmetric DeFi and an active Flipside Data Analyst, having completed 64 dashboards around DeFi.
Square-Root-ETH (Sqreeth) Blog Post
This grant will fund an article explaining the concept of square-root token exposure via Uniswap. This material will explain to the community how an Eth-Stable Uni-v2 (or a full-range Uni-v3) LP position provides equivalent exposure as a “square-root-eth” long position, and how to get into that position in Uniswap.
Grant Size: $500, across 2 disbursements
Impact: This article will teach the Uniswap community the intricacies of this complex concept, which will eventually provide LPs with more flexibility through a wider range of LPing options.
Recipient: Sharif Elfouly. Sharif is a smart contract developer who has worked across stablecoin, NFT, and crypto tooling projects.
Governance Stewardship
Uniswap Agora
This grant will support the development of Uniswap Agora, which will result in the deployment of a new fully fledged governance front end in the form of a Uniswap governance app. This app aims to facilitate governance participation and effective decision making as it provides a client facing portal with new, liquid delegation features (i.e. re-delegation, time-bound delegation, override and voting permissions), delegate platform pages, and a governance activity feed.
Grant Size: $85,000, across 3 disbursements
Impact: An improved governance UI/UX will head towards a frictionless and transparent governance process, which is key to attracting higher quality contributors, better ROI proposals, and having an engaged and informed community, enabling the ecosystem to grow and thrive.
Recipient: Agora. The Agora team has previously deployed a similar governance app for other top DAOs in the space such as Nouns DAO and ENS.
Alastor’s Independent Report on the Uniswap Fee Switch
This grant supported Alastor’s report on the fee switch, which included a broad market analysis, competitor benchmarking, stakeholder sentiment, pool selection methodologies, and a trading/liquidity scenario analysis. The team conducted comprehensive stakeholder interviews and presented their final research to the community (Twitter spaces recording here).
Grant Size: $75,000, across 2 disbursements
Impact: Alastor’s report aims to help the community make a more informed decision through coverage of qualitative and quantitative elements concerning the fee switch.
Recipient: Alastor. Alastor is a strategic and financial advisor for web3, and they have conducted similar qualitative and quantitative analyses for other top DAOs as well.
Potential Options for the Uniswap Fee Switch
This grant supports research about potential use cases for fees generated by the Uniswap Fee Switch. The team will explore 4 main pillars of grants, treasury management, governance, and community engagement to see how to best align the fees generated with the protocol’s long term goals. This research will produce and rank potential recommendations for the Fee Switch.
Grant Size: $16,000, across 2 disbursements
Impact: This research will be presented to the community to give the community more information on how to best use the funds, allowing them to make a more informed decision for future experiments.
Recipient: Blocksmith. Blocksmith is a blockchain studio based in London that supports early stage products across the world with the support of Whitesmith, a product studio supported by KR1, Europe’s leading public crypto investment company.
DAO Governance Reimagined: Crowd Coordination and Beyond
This grant supports a research project aimed to further analyze Uniswap governance and its current gaps. The goal is to learn about potential methods that make proposing, commenting, and voting on ideas more effective and inclusive.
Grant Size: $4,000, across 2 disbursements
Impact: Effective governance is critical to the success of the Uniswap protocol and properly understanding its current gaps will allow the community to productively introduce new solutions.
Recipient: Mike Maizels. Mike has previously worked as Head of Research at Abra, and he was a leading researcher in crowd intelligence at MIT Sloan.