Uniswap moves closer to a new five million UNI airdrop

The second-ever governance proposal for the Uniswap decentralized exchange (DEX) is more than halfway to reaching a quorum with a little over 30 hours to go.

If passed, the proposal will see 12,619 wallet addresses that interacted with Uniswap via a proxy contract receive 400 UNI tokens each. 5.05 million UNI in total will be allocated to the users of MyEtherWallet, Argent, Dharma, DeFi Saver, Nuo, Eidoo, Opyn, Furucombo, Monolith, and Rebalance.

The proposal was put forward by Compound-based lending and savings protocol Dharma, who claimed its users felt “left out” by the initial distribution.

The cohort of proxies were chosen due to them being “less programmatically accessible,” suggesting “a lower likelihood of multiple addresses per end-user.”

“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.”

The voting deadline is roughly 8:00 am UTC on October 31.

Should the vote pass, Dharma plans to put forward a secondary proposal for retroactive distribution. “Should both Phases pass, we will not vote in favor of any further retroactive airdrops,” Dharma noted.

The vote appears to be steadily gaining support, with the number of votes in favor increasing roughly 25% in the past couple of hours to 25.93 million, compared with 1.26 million votes against. A quorum of 40 million votes in favor must be submitted to pass the proposal.

However, Uniswap’s first governance vote, also put forward by Dharma, recently failed due to falling short of a quorum by the deadline by just 1% despite 98% of votes cast supporting the proposal.

Although the number of opposing votes was low, several analysts suggested that a large segment of the community may have opposed the proposal by abstaining from the vote.

The second proposal has also received pushback, with SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani criticizing the retroactive distribution for failing to “create any wealth for UNI holders” while removing funds from the project’s treasury that could be allocated elsewhere, and giving the tokens “to folks who will likely sell it, probably having a small negative price impact.”

Despite his qualms, Soleimani conceded he would vote in favor of the proposal should it be “the absolute last fund recovery ever,” warning that Uniswap must “avoid these kinds of governance quagmires” moving forward.