Uniswap’s $40M Governance Vote Closes on Halloween and Some UNI Holders Fear for Price
While the vote may look extremely lopsided at the moment, the proposal will fail if less than 40 million UNI vote, establishing a quorum. The key obstacle to passage is probably reaching that threshold.
The decision is widely interesting enough to the crypto community that it’s inspired a betting market on Polymarket, which currently leans toward the pitch for further UNI distributions failing.
If both proposals succeed, however, an additional 15,679,200 UNI would be distributed from the existing treasury, worth approximately $40.6 million, at the current price of $2.59 per UNI. Of that, 5,047,600 UNI would be redistributed from the treasury in phase one.
400 UNI, 40,000 more times
When the company behind Ethereum’s leading automated market maker, Uniswap, announced its governance token, UNI, in September, it surprised everyone by giving away 400 UNI to all wallets that had ever even used the decentralized application. Directly, that is.
At the time, each airdrop was worth well over $1,000.
Read more: Uniswap’s Distribution Is Built on Something That Can’t Be Forked: Actual Users
As a governance token, each UNI can be used to vote on decisions about changes to the dapp and also on expenditures from the Uniswap treasury, which has a supply of 430 million UNI or 43% of the initial supply.
The proposal under consideration now, and the one that will follow, concerns giving the airdrop to people who missed out on the gravy train through a technicality.
These individuals interacted with Uniswap using third-party software that enabled the transaction, touching Uniswap by way of a proxy contract. That made each of their wallets invisible to Uniswap itself. As the proponents of the proposal have argued: If decentralized finance (DeFi) is about money legos, what message does it send if only users of the base lego get the free crypto?
The current proposal centers on users who interacted with Uniswap via 10 different dapps — the largest being MyEtherWallet (MEW), Argent and Dharma, in that order.
Phase two involves users who interacted with Uniswap via decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregators. Five DEX aggregators represent 26,598 accounts, with the largest by far on the Kyber Network.
