Uniswap’s Retroactive Round of UNI Aidrop Still up in the Air

There is a new governance proposal on the Uniswap table that would see more than 5 million governance tokens distributed to those using it via a proxy contract.

The community of the Uniswap decentralized exchange (DEX) is currently in the process of voting on its second-ever governance proposal according to which 12,619 wallet addresses that interacted with the DEX through a third party, or a proxy contract, would each receive 400 UNI tokens (around USD 926).

This means that 5,047,600 UNI in total would be given to users of the following projects: Argent, DeFi Saver, Dharma, Eidoo, Furucombo, Mew, Monolith, Nuo, Opyn, and Rebalance. The proposal would transfer this total amount of UNI to a new MerkleDistributor contract, which would then allow each account to claim exactly 400 of them.

“These 12,619 users are “Phase 1″ of the Retroactive Distribution, encompassing users of application-integrations. All of these 12,619 addresses were excluded from the original airdrop,” the proposal description said.

At the moment of writing, nearly 26 million votes were cast for the proposal, and 1.27 million against. Voting is expected to end on October 31.

This specific proposal was put on the table by lending and savings protocol Dharma, who said back in September that “the way the retroactive airdrop was architected seemed to make a slight oversight in the snapshotting process — only addresses which directly called the Uniswap contracts were considered to be users.” That’s when they had announced their intention to submit a proposal.

Now, if this vote passes, they will submit another proposal, stating that they are “committed to carrying out the Retroactive Airdrop proposal.” Dharma added that: “If either Phase fails, we will accept that as the final determination of the Uniswap community. Should both Phases pass, we will not vote in favor of any further retroactive airdops.” They added that “Phase 1 includes users of the application integrations, Phase 2 includes users of DEX aggregators.”

Despite the support this proposal has been getting, the majority voting for, even if it’s a large majority, doesn’t mean the proposal passes. The first governance proposal, also submitted by Dharma – which would’ve reduced the number of tokens needed to submit and pass proposals – failed as it did not reach the necessary number of 40m votes, and even though it was very close with 35.6, votes for and less than 700,000 against.

The team behind Ethereum (ETH)‘s automated market maker announced its governance token in September, along with an airdrop of 400 UNI to all wallets that used the DEX. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams tweeted on October 22 that they “were aware users of some integrations wouldn’t get UNI but giving to all proxies would have given [a] huge amount to [arbitrage] bots and less to real people.”

But some, like SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani, criticized governance in general, writing that he hates it, because, among other reasons, it’s too expensive and time-consuming.

At pixel time (10:28 UTC), UNI trades at USD 2.3 and is down by almost 12% in a day and 23% in a week. The price also crashed by 44% in a month.
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Learn more:
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DeFi Governance Tokens Face Three Challenges