Some of my thoughts on this:
- The reality on the Uniswap case is -gymnastics-aside- very simple: there is a single organisation really maintaining/moving forward a project, which is completely legit and should not be penalised regulatory-wise, especially being an arguably very decentralised system. You don’t need a governance token for that (e.g., Coinbase, even if centralised), though.
- Governance tokens make sense if they are very involved in both strategic and operational aspects of an on-chain protocol. The whole point of blockchain is the ability to scale and program human and constraint-machines (e.g., smart contracts) governance participation. If a token can decide more or less on a fee switch à-la-UNI and where to send itself to finance operations (selling, borrowing against), well, you don’t need a governance token, you need funding, cashflows, money.
- There is actually a pretty simple “test” to perform for whether a governance token really gives value or not: take a protocol X, hypothetically assume the original team disappears or only contributes partially, and realistically identify if the system has chances to not only survive, but to grow. I think people would be slightly surprised by how many out there really fulfill this.
- Binarism/polarisation is unfortunately the type of narrative around in the industry: X actor with a name does Y, definitely that's the way. Probably time to go back to reality, where almost nothing is so simple.
Uniswap fee switch proposal is killing the decentralized DAO model.
Uniswap foundation activities move to Uniswap Labs, meaning...
...decision power moves from a non-profit organization governed by $UNI holders to a Delaware centralized corporation.
- Most Foundation employees move to Uniswap Labs
- The Foundation only keeps a tiny grants team
- After the remaining ~$100M grants are deployed, the Foundation shuts down
Thus $UNI token is no longer a DAO token but a token purely valued by buybacks/fees Uniswap will be able to generate.
It's not a criticism but admitting the facts that:
- The DAO model was indeed just pretending decentralization due to regulatory struggles
- DAOs are inefficient at governing and allocating resources
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Uniswap isn't the first to do it either:
- Scroll fully shuts down the DAO and moved to centralized governance
- Arbitrum's "Vision for the Future" moves many decisions to the core group of Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain Labs to 'fix inefficiencies'
- Optimism Season 8 centralizes power by moving real decisions to curated stakeholder groups and councils while tokenholders only keep veto rights
- Lido’s BORG model centralizes execution into legal foundations run by appointed directors while the DAO only sets high level direction
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The famous a16z "Progressive Decentralization" model of finding PMF and exiting to the community for sufficient decentralization is dying.
Or it was just simply pretending in the first place.
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