Nuance and Speed: The Fault in our DAOs
Recently, Dune raised some fair critiques on Uniswap’s recent “Community-Enabled Analytics” proposal, by Flipside Crypto. The proposal allocates $25M of $UNI to perpetually fund bounties for community analytics and DeFi educational programs.
It also funds Flipside Crypto and some of its employees to help operate the program. This, alongside a potential conflict of interest in the Oversight Committee, led to the majority of complaints by Dune and other community members.
I’m not here to argue for or against these concerns, but to highlight the larger discourse of nuance and speed in DAO governances. It ails this current proposal, the contentious “DeFi Education Fund” proposal, and many proposals in the future.
UMich Blockchain voted for “Community-Enabled Analytics” based on one mental model: is this proposal a net positive for the Uniswap ecosystem? From a greedy algorithm perspective, yes — attracting new analysts & creating new dashboards is beneficial for Uniswap users.
Sure, a vendor-neutral proposal would have been ideal. But UMich Blockchain and other voters weren’t given that option. We had to choose between “Community-Enabled Analytics” or no “Community-Enabled Analytics”. There were no competing proposals.
And this highlights the problem: the lack of alternatives leaves little room for nuance. DAO governance suffers the same issue as modern media: the conversation is too one-sided. In the fight between nuance (from competing proposals) and speed (of a binary option for a specific proposal), Uniswap governance chooses speed.
Speed is important, but at what cost?
Imagine if Uniswap Governance set a voting-free “reading period” where community members can comment on proposals, raise concerns, and create alternatives. Currently, Dune raised concerns after many prominent voters had already cast their permanent votes. Had Dune Analytics been made aware of Flipside’s proposal earlier, could they have teamed up with other analytics protocols to offer a vendor-neutral proposal instead?
Imagine if Uniswap Governance allowed us to select between a few competing proposals rather than limiting our options to “yes” and “no” for a single proposal. Utilizing ranked-choice voting, we could make better, informed decisions as a community.
Remember, nuance and speed are at direct odds with one another. We, as members of the Uniswap DAO, have to decide where the proper balance is for our governance. And then, we have the power, and thus responsibility, to change our governance system.
