The past few months have been a whirlwind for the Uniswap Foundation since it was formally approved by Uniswap governance in August. Here, we highlight some of what the UF has accomplished since its creation.

Growth & Innovation

Growth & Innovation Funding

1. We have announced ~$2.7M in grants to 33 projects across 2 waves (Wave 1, Wave 2). Many of these grants illustrate the kinds of long-term oriented, high impact work that the UF was founded to support.

2. Our first grant to do R&D into a developer mining specification resulted in an in-depth research paper on valuing nontoxic order flow – and additional research grants focused on optimizing incentive programs will be announced in the coming weeks.

Grants & Growth Programs

1. We launched the Request for Proposal (RFP) program. We announced the first round of RFP grant recipients in January and will be announcing the recipients for the second round of RFPs shortly.

2. We launched Office Hours, opening up our Grants Team’s time to speak with potential grantees about the grants process.

3. We sponsored and attended 3 hackathons, with some projects evolving to contribute meaningfully to community experience post-hackathon (i.e., Aditya Agarwal’s improvements to the Arbitrum subgraph).

4. We updated our internal grants process and supporting infrastructure, with the goal of improving applicant experience and shortening processing time while maintaining our high quality standards.

Governance & Stewardship

Fee Switch

1. Through grants and our own work, we provided the community with analysis and research which could be used to move forward on the discussion on the fee switch. This support includes:

   1. A post by Erin Koen on the technical mechanics of the fee switch,

   2. An analysis by the Alastor team,

   3. A published set of legal and regulatory considerations for the most recent proposal,

   4. Work by Blocksmith to understand the tradeoffs of various fee switch uses,

   5. And a set of recommendations regarding how Uniswap governance might handle uncertainty related to tax questions, including a call for research and proposals to implement new mechanisms for distributing protocol fees to specific persons, for instance to those who have “opted-in” by taking some action to benefit the Protocol (proposal response, new post)

Cross-Chain Deployments

1. In the realm of cross-chain deployments, we have published a primer on v3’s Business Source License and a Cross-chain deployment guide

2. We have supported multiple proposals to deploy Uniswap v3 on other chains. Some have passed, including the proposals to deploy on zkSync, Boba Network, BNBChain, and Avalanche. We’re also planning to continue to support proposals in flight - including those to continue the deployments on Moonbeam and GnosisChain, and to deploy on Kava, Scroll, Polygon zkEVM, and others.

3. We recently proposed an approach for Uniswap governance to determine “official” Uniswap deployments on L1s and L2s after the BSL expires, and are currently aggregating feedback from the community as we push that forward.

4. We created the Cross-Chain Bridge Assessment Committee and Process, aggregating a set of experts from across the crypto ecosystem to assess the viability of multiple bridges and bridge agnostic solutions for the Uniswap governance use case. They provided their most recent update here.

5. We organized a Twitter Space with the StarkWare and Nethermind teams to discuss a potential deployment of Uniswap v3 on StarkNet, which would be v3’s first non-EVM deployment.

Governance & Stewardship Grants

1. We awarded a grant to the Agora team to develop Uniswap Agora, a fully-fledged governance interface that facilitates governance participation through the enablement of new features such as delegate platform pages and liquid delegation.

2. We supported Penn Blockchain/FranklinDAO to deep dive into Uniswap governance through a series of interviews across Uniswap stakeholder groups, resulting in a series of recommendations the UF will take into account in future work and funding efforts.

3. We kicked off distribution of Shields, an on-chain design project which originated through UGP, to past grantees. If you are a grantee and have not yet received a Shield, reach out!

Governance Process

1. We passed a proposal to streamline the Uniswap community governance process, with a focus on enhancing its effectiveness and efficiency.

2. We provided hands-on support to teams which put forth proposals. After identifying an issue with the bridge passing governance messages to the Uniswap deployment on Arbitrum, we worked closely with that team to resolve it. For instance, we delegated 2.5M UNI through the Franchiser so the team could put forth their proposal to fix the bridge.

Working Groups

1. We supported Other Internet’s work in setting up an Accountability working group with several members of the community. This group put forth an improvement to the Cross-Chain Deployment Proposal and recently passed a successful Temperature Check to formalize the group.

2. We coordinated the Optimism-Uniswap Protocol Liquidity Mining program, Phase 1 of which was completed in November 2022, and Phase 2 in February 2023. Phase 3 will be run by a Liquidity Mining Working Group made up of community members from Arrakis, xToken Terminal, Gamma Strategies, and DefiEdge.

3. We launched the Uniswap-Optimism Protocol Delegation Committee, a group of six individuals who will participate in this current season of Optimism governance on behalf of the Uniswap ecosystem. We hope to use the learnings from this Committee as a model to learn from for future cross-protocol governance participation.

4. The UGP Community Analytics Program was spun off from the UF to be completely community run - and recently kicked off Bounty #23.

Operations

1. We hired some of the best builders and operators across the web3 ecosystem, and are excited to now have a team of 7! In addition to Devin and Ken, our team is currently made up of:

   1. Raphaela Sapire, Growth Lead and interim Grants Lead

   2. Tyllen Bicakcic, Developer Relations Lead

   3. Andy Forman, Protocol Liaison and Entrepreneur-in-Residence

   4. Federico Landini, Grants Analyst

   5. Honn, Grants Analyst

   6. We are also very thankful for the contributions of Boris Stanic, who contributed to the growth of the Uniswap Grants Program (UGP) at its earliest stages, and assisted in developing the UF Grants Program over the past several months.

   7. We are also thankful to benefit from the contributions of YJ, a part-time Uniswap Grants Contributor.

2. Legal Entity Update: We filed to receive 501(c)(4) status as a US-based non-profit in October. As of right now, we are waiting on the IRS to process our application.

3. After we received our initial disbursement on August 26, 2022, we worked with a broker to convert 1,992,000 UNI to a mix of USD and USDC. These transactions occurred over 6 weeks at an average price of $6.40, resulting in ~$12.8M which we have since spread across USD and stablecoins (USDC and DAI). We continue to hold 468,000 UNI.

4. We currently have a total of ~$8.55M in cash and stablecoins (USDC and DAI). We continue to hold 468,000 UNI. We have committed to spend $3.5M in grants since launch and have already deployed ~$2M of that.

5. We plan to request our second disbursements of funds from Uniswap governance in Q3 or Q4 of this year.

We’re incredibly grateful for the community’s support over the past several months – and are so excited for everything that’s ahead of us! We have much more in the pipeline – stay tuned for more announcements to come. 🦄🦄🦄