Uniswap’s Second Governance Proposal Could See 5 Million UNI Airdropped

The second Uniswap governance proposal could see 5 million UNI tokens being airdropped to 12,619 addresses that interacted with the DEX through a proxy contract.

Back in September, decentralized exchange Uniswap officially launched its governance token UNI, and noted that it will give away 60% of the tokens to community members that have participated in Uniswap V1 or Uniswap V2. This, however, did not include wallet addresses that interacted with Uniswap through a third-party interface, which resulted in lending and savings protocol Dharma putting forth the second-ever governance proposal, which if passed, will see 12,619 addresses receive 400 UNI tokens each.

The 12.619 accounts are held by users of MyEtherWallet, Argent, Dharma, DeFi Saver, Nuo, Eidoo, Opyn, Furucombo, Monolith, and Rebalance. As of press time, 28.5 million UNI have been voted in favor of the proposal, while only 1.2 million have been voted against. While the majority of votes have been cast in favor of the proposal, it does not mean it will pass, as a quorum of 40 million votes in favor is required for that. The deadline for voting has been set for 08:00 AM UTC on 31 October.

If the proposal is passed, Dharma plans to put forward a secondary proposal for retroactive distribution, this time involving almost 27,000 accounts that interacted with Uniswap via a DEX aggregator. This “phase two” will see an additional 10 million UNI being redistributed from the Uniswap treasury. Dharma noted that should both phases pass, it will not vote in favor of any further retroactive airdrops.

The CEO of Dharma, Nadav Hollander, said during a group discussion on YouTube:

“Ultimately the crux of the argument we are making is that the status quo has sort of negatively punished developers who took risks building on top of Uniswap.”

The founder of Uniswap, Hayden Adams, noted on Twitter that his team was aware that some users would not receive UNI from the original airdrop, but stated that if UNI was given to all proxies, most would have gone to bots and not real people. He tweeted:

While the second governance proposal is currently being put to a vote, the first one failed to reach a quorum by the deadline by just 1%. Also put forth by Dharma, the first proposal would have given the top UNI holders a significant power over decisions regarding Uniswap, potentially hurting the decentralization of the platform. It proposed lowering the UNI governance proposal and quorum thresholds significantly, which according to community member David Felton, would have created a possibility for another DAO hack.

In reaction to the possible airdrop, UNI’s price has dropped significantly, from a stable $3 which it held for about 2 weeks to today’s $2.27 low.