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What’s Going On With Smart Contract Governance?

Does it work yet?

Alex Roan
Coinmonks
Published in
4 min readOct 4, 2020

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Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

The 18th of September was like any other day for the first few hours. Get up, have breakfast, check Twitter… wait, why is Uniswap trending? It didn’t take long to discover the reason for the explosion in Uniswap tweets was due to the sudden announcement of Uniswap’s own token: $UNI. Better yet, how it was being distributed.

400 $UNI tokens were distributed to every single address that had ever used the platform in any way, even if that consisted of a single (even failed!) transaction. Not only that, but there was extra handed out for long term liquidity providers.

Obviously, I frantically navigated Uniswap, which was struggling from thousands of others doing the same thing, to check if I had a claim to make. And make it I did, incurring substantial fees in the process due to the announcement causing spikes in GAS prices.

“With proper governance, life will improve for all”

An inspiring quote, but in the world of smart contract protocols, we’re yet to see true improvement over a long timespan through on-chain governance.

Truth be told, no one really knows how on-chain governance should work (A fact that mirrors the real world). From a democratic standpoint, it’s extremely…

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Coinmonks
Coinmonks

Published in Coinmonks

Coinmonks is a non-profit Crypto Educational Publication. Other Project — https://coincodecap.com/ & Email — gaurav@coincodecap.com

Alex Roan
Alex Roan

Written by Alex Roan

CoFounder at Cyfrin. Previously: Chainlink Labs.

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