Uniswap Retroactive Proxy Contract Airdrop Proposal Receives 28 Million Votes

Community voting is on for Uniswap’s new governance proposal. The same will see users receive more than 5 million UNI tokens via a proxy contract. As of now, more than 28 million votes have gone in favor of the airdrop. Around 1.3 million votes are against the proposal.

Voting Begins For Uniswap’s Second UNI Airdrop

The voting process is on for passing Uniswap’s Phase 1 of Retroactive UNI Governance Token Distribution. The proposal, if successfully passed, will see 12,619 wallet addresses receive 400 UNI tokens each. However, for the successful receipt of the tokens, they must have interacted with the DEX through a third party or a proxy contract.

As per the numbers shared in the description on the official Uniswap website:

Specifically, this proposal transfers 5,047,600 UNI to a new MerkleDistributor contract, which will then allow for 400 UNI to be claimed by each of the 12,619 accounts held by users of the following projects:

Project	Accounts	% of total
Argent	3418	27.09%
DeFi Saver	890	7.05%
Dharma	2833	22.45%
eidoo	301	2.39%
FURUCOMBO	57	0.45%
MEW	4278	33.90%
Monolith	19	0.15%
Nuo	740	5.86%
Opyn	79	0.63%
rebalance	4	0.03%

Currently, the airdrop proposal has received upwards of 28 million votes. And around 1.3 million are against the helicopter-like distribution of Uniswap’s governance tokens. Voting will end on October 31 at 8 AM UTC. A quorum of 40 million votes is necessary to pass the proposal.

Dharma Protocol Proposed The Proposal Because…

Back in September, its users were left out of the initial airdrop. According to the Dharma team,

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.

Also, increased programmatic bot proliferation might have resulted in one user having multiple addresses. As per the description:

The Phase determination was made based on how easy it is to programmatically hook a trading bot into them, as this is a proxy for what portion of these cohorts risk representing multiple addresses per end-user. Phase 1 is the less programmatically accessible cohort, indicating a lower likelihood of multiple addresses per end-user.

If Phase 1 Passes, There Will Be Phase 2

On the successful passing of the first phase, Dharma has pledged to put in place a second UNI governance token distribution proposal. But they have also discretely mentioned their agreement to the final result (success or failure) of both voting processes.

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.

Has this proposal gone down well with other members of the community? Well, some like Jeff Dorman, CIO of the investment management firm Arca have presented a bullish case for UNI (as opposed to those who think the proposal will actually devalue the token’s price).

In a detailed Tweet thread, Jeff called Uniswap’s governance token a ‘pass-thru token.’

UNI is being misrepresented as a “governance” token, and the market has shown that governance has no value. But in reality, UNI is a pass-thru token — where revenues will be passed thru to token holders. $UNI holders are about to earn a very large revenue stream in Feb 2021.