UNI Price Skyrockets 20% as Uniswap Governance Proposes More Voting Power 

The proposal seeks to delegate 10 million UNI from the DAO’s treasury to underrepresented delegates.

The top four candidates get up to 2.5 million UNI, and the rest of the tokens will be equally delegated to other candidates.

The proposal, currently in ‘temperature check’, now faces an on-chain vote before delegates would receive UNI from the DAO’s treasury.

Moreover, the tokens would not be tradeable, just used by these delegates for voting purposes, increasing their say in governance proposals.

4/ 1inch Vote

📝 This vote ratifies the selling of ~2.5M ARB tokens from the 1inch DAO to USDC on Arbitrum. The USDC will be sent to DAO’s treasury & the funds will be used to grow the 1inch Network & improve DAO’s financial position

Leading Consensus: Yes – 11M UP (92.58%) pic.twitter.com/2KYZPJPlOt

— Wintermute (@wintermute_t) November 22, 2023

Uniswap Governance Improvements

Uniswap’s DAO allows token holders to either vote themselves or delegate their voting power to another entity. There are more than 30 delegates with at least 2.5 million delegated votes. This is the level at which delegates are deemed “underrepresented.”

StableLab, the governance service provider that made the delegation proposal would also receive governance tokens were it to pass. The proposal noted:

“Many top delegates with considerable voting power have less than 50% vote participation rate, and some even as low as 10% or 0%,”

Uniswap governance has been heavily criticized in the past due to voting being dominated by just a handful of UNI whales such as a16z, Dharma, and Gauntlet.

The current system remains centralized in the hands of these huge token holders so smaller delegates have little chance to have their votes matter.

Several proposals have been passed in previous years due to the voting power of just a single entity. In 2020, Dharma proposed dropping the quorum threshold from 40 million UNI, or 4% of the total, to 3% giving it even more voting power.

UNI Price Skyrockets

Uniswap prices have skyrocketed over the past 24 hours though it remains to be seen whether this is directly related to the proposal.

UNI has climbed from $5.25 to hit an intraday and 14-week high of $6.26 during the Thursday morning Asian trading session. It is currently up 18% on the day outperforming the rest of the crypto markets.

The DeFi exchange token has made 42% over the past month as crypto markets recover. However, UNI remains down 86% from its May 2021 all-time high of $44.92.