karpatkey is a DeFi-native organisation specialising in professional treasury development through industry-leading research and tooling since 2020. We’ve been working with GnosisDAO, Balancer, ENS, CoW Protocol, and Lido to diversify their treasuries into sustainable portfolios of DeFi investments designed to support the DAOs in their missions.
What do you want to see happen in Uniswap governance over the next year?
Further initiatives to strengthen Uniswap's status as the leading decentralised exchange across numerous chains and for a wide array of assets, aiming to expand cross-chain deployments and stimulate protocol development. This will empower Uniswap to credibly compete with centralised exchanges as a preferred platform for professional trading.
Careful, thoughtful, and inclusive progress in the discussions around the Fee Switch and other value-accrual design mechanisms, as a means to reach long-term sustainability without compromising growth and adoption.
Further initiatives to foster a competitive, vibrant, and diverse ecosystem of teams contributing to the protocol to avoid single point of failure dependences and foster innovation.
With the first steps being laid out with the creation of the Uniswap Foundation, we expect more initiatives like the Uniswap Agora and other tooling/processes geared towards improving the governance process and ultimately increasing participation rate and high-value discussion and action.
Reasons for wanting to be a delegate:
Uniswap validated product-market fit for highly decentralised financial infrastructures and ultimately led the way in the evolution and growth of DeFi. As a champion of Ethereum principles around neutrality and trust minimisation, it is now essential to evolve beyond its core team and push for community-driven growth, development, and self-sustainability.
A robust and progressive governance system will be essential moving forward, giving community members more opportunity to become involved and influence the protocol ecosystem, whether directly or indirectly. We’ve been advocates of delegated voting in DAO governance as a viable solution to improve the legitimacy, inclusivity, and effectiveness of decision-making processes. However, the efficacy of this system is highly dependent on having domain experts actively involved as delegates. They transform the delegation process into a dynamic ecosystem where insights are not just shared but are also meticulously examined and thoughtfully applied. It fosters a symbiotic relationship between all stakeholders, optimising the quality of collective decisions and reinforcing the democratic underpinnings of DAOs.
As DAO treasury developers and contributors to some of the most reputable DeFi protocols in our industry, we believe that our team has the knowledge, trust, and alignment to meaningfully contribute to Uniswap’s growth moving forward. Check out our values to understand a bit more about our guiding and decision-making principles.
Skills and areas of expertise:
Our past work has led us to develop internal infrastructure for automatic on-chain treasury execution and risk management, which ultimately generated objective knowledge across DeFi protocols and hands-on user experience. karpatkey’s governance team taps our network of engineers, DeFi strategists, data/financial/quant analysts, and accountants for subject matter expertise.
We’re also advocates of DAO alliances through treasury swaps as a means of reaching a more resilient DeFi ecosystem through treasury diversification and better value alignment as the ecosystem matures.
Past contributions to Uniswap ecosystem and/or demonstrated protocol knowledge:
We’ve historically deployed a combined $62.91M worth of LP positions in both Uniswap V2 and V3:
This ultimately led us to develop internal models to optimise our liquidity ranges, resulting in increased capital efficiency and earnings. On the other hand, we’ve provided market depth on less popular pools, which ultimately contributed to the platform's liquidity and diversity while simultaneously capitalising on unique opportunities for attractive returns.
What are your views on 3 past Uniswap governance proposals?
2.38: Uniswap Deployments Accountability Committee: FOR. The upcoming expiry of Uniswap’s BSL further reinforces the need to bring a structured approach to the oversight of deployments of Uniswap V3 on other chains. The thorough assessment, technical/operation support, and recommendation for community approval of new deployments will be essential to guarantee the protection of the Uniswap brand equity and establish market share moving forward.
We’re happy with the proposed initial signers as they bring a diverse representation of interests and expertise, and we think the compensation is fair given the required workload.
2.36: Uniswap v3 Gnosis: FOR. One of the primary advantages of the Gnosis Chain is its ability to offer stable, low-cost transactions, a feature that would directly benefit Uniswap users. Lower gas costs mean that users could deploy strategies more efficiently and at higher volumes, generating more fees than they could on the Mainnet.
As the canary chain for Ethereum, the Gnosis Chain also provides an environment for Uniswap to experiment with new functionalities and features. The platform offers a realistic value environment for evaluating the platform's capabilities and identifying potential issues before they are activated on Mainnet.
Finally, the Gnosis Chain is dedicated to expanding its user base and on-chain activity by providing user incentives, an initiative karpatkey has been actively involved in. Part of these incentives includes promoting Uniswap V3 adoption, which could increase liquidity and activity on the platform, thereby establishing Uniswap as a leading DeFi protocol on the Gnosis Chain.
2.34: Governance Proposal - Uniswap V3 Launch on zkEVM: FOR. Although we reckon its complex implementation and early-stage maturity, ZK EVM chains represent a promising direction for rollups and could well overcome optimistic architectures as a better option to address Ethereum’s scalability challenges.
We generally support cross-chain Uniswap protocol deployments (especially on those with meaningful activity and/or reputation) as a strategic initiative to maintain its market leader position.
However, we’d like to see more thoughtful cost-benefit analysis and better representation in the community discussion in future proposals like this. The two only comments in the proposal discussion had no replies from the authors.
Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest:
No conflicts of interest other than the aforementioned contributions to competing DEXes—although we rather see it as an opportunity—as we can leverage our connections to promote strategic synergies moving forward.
Top Issues
Fee switch
We're supporters of careful, thoughtful, and inclusive progress in the discussions around the Fee Switch and other value-accrual design mechanisms as a means to reach long-term sustainability without compromising on growth and adoption.
Cross chain deployments
We generally support cross-chain Uniswap protocol deployments (especially on those with meaningful activity and/or reputation) as a strategic initiative to maintain its market leader position.
DAO working groups
The protocol should be able to evolve beyond Uniswap Labs by decentralising its development under DAO working groups or similar governance mechanisms.
