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Uniswap launches its governance token UNI to keep up with the stiff competition

Photo of: Janeth Diamond
by Janeth Diamond

In an announcement made last night, Uniswap has decided to launch its governance token. To cope up with competition especially with rival Automated market maker SushiSwap, it has launched its governance token UNI. The new token will be allocated to the Uniswap community members. The segregation will ensure that the community members get 60% of all tokens, team members and future employees get 21.5%, investors get their fair share at 17.8%, and lastly advisors get a marginal share of 0.69%. 

According to the organization, UNI will set the seal on Uniswap as a publicly owned and a self-sustainable infrastructure without sacrificing autonomy. The decision to launch the new governance token comes only a week after SushiSwap managed to shift and migrate $800 million worth crypto assets from its rival. SushiSwap began with the launch of a token that enabled liquidity mining and let users load up on assets before migration so that they could extract maximum benefit and rewards when Sushiswap went live. 

Ever since the Uniswap protocol initiated, it has been serving as a trustless network with a highly decentralized financial infrastructure. Uniswap has been inspired by the vision of Ethereum and is committed to the ideas of giving permissionless access, unstinted security, and immutability. Such a vision will inch the word towards accessing financial services without any fear of counterparty risk or discrimination. There is without any doubt, high demand for permissionless financial services, and Uniswap intends to fulfill these demands to come out victorious. 

Uniswap will also launch a liquidity mining program on September 18th targeting its USDT, USDC, DAI, and wBTC pools. Uniswap has proven to be extremely fit and agile for highly decentralized financial infrastructure and now it is in a position for community-led growth. The introduction of UNI will surely serve the purpose while allowing for shared community ownership and a dedicated governance system that will actively guide the protocol towards the future. 

What it needs to keep in mind is that governance should be restrained to areas where it is needed the most. With this thought in mind, the governance framework is limited to contributing to protocol development and usage as well as the holistic development of the Uniswap ecosystem. 

Uniswap governance will be live from the day of its inception but the total control over the treasury will be delayed until October 17th, 2020 12:00 am UTC. The control over the Uniswap fee switch will be prone to a 180-day time lock delay. With these grace periods, the community can get enough time to get acquainted with the governance system and discuss potential governance proposals. 

Holders of UNI would be responsible to ensure that the governance decisions are made in compliance with the necessary laws and regulations. There is a fee switch to accomplish this. The fee switch has been started to a contract which UNI holders can use to vote on tokens for which will collect fees.