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Preliminary analysis and scoring of Uniswap

Scoring Uniswap with the DAO Index Version 0.9

Published onApr 11, 2023
Preliminary analysis and scoring of Uniswap
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Brief background information

What is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)?

Please refer to Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) by Samer Hassan and Primavera De Filippi.

Uniswap

Website | Twitter

The Uniswap Protocol is a public good owned and governed by UNI token holders

DAO Index Version 0.9

Questionnaire

I recently updated the DAO Index questionnaire to Version 0.9. You can find the original post on the update here.

You can find Version 0.9 of the questionnaire below or here.

Completed DAO Index V0.9 questionnaire for Uniswap

DAO Index Fields

Additional note: Some of the questions in the DAO Index V0.9 are meant to be aspirational, to help direct DAOs towards better practices advancing or adhering to the principles.

Fields

Description

Example

Principle

An organizing principle for DAOs, specific to the particular version of the DAO Index in use

Indicator

An area that indicates where a DAO is or can turn the principle into practice

Question-ID

The identification number of the question, per principle.

Question

A yes/no question written in text to assess whether a DAO’s practices adhere or advance a principle

Plain-English

A response to the Question in English (or natural language).

Yes/No/Partial/Does not answer the question, N/A

Points

The numeric score received for the question, corresponding to the Plain-English response.

Explanation

A brief explanation of why the DAO received a certain Plain-English and Point response

Sources

The sources referred to in drafting a response

Author

The rater(s) or respondent(s) to the Question

Notes

Respondent(s) notes regarding a question

Search Difficulty

The difficulty in searching for documents to reference to respond to a Question

Documents

The documents cited in a Response

Snippets

The snippets cited in a Response


Preliminary Analysis and Scores

This pub covers the preliminary analysis and scoring of Uniswap with the DAO Index Version 0.9.

Questionnaire Responses

You can find the responses to the DAO Index V0.9 questionnaire for Uniswap in the embed below.

The embed includes the scores (Points and Plain-English response) and explanation for each question’s response.

Completed DAO Index V0.9 questionnaire for Uniswap

Scores

Uniswap received an overall score of 2450/4500 (67.77%).

Uniswap had an N/A score of 0 (i.e., every question was applicable to Uniswap).

There were 11 questions that could not be answered because of an inability to locate sources or their non-existence.

Uniswap’s overall score and score per principle are summarized in the table below.

Summary Table

Principle

Acronym

Score

Total

Percentage

Broad stakeholder participation

BSP

600

1300

46.15%

Cross-border coordination

CBC

100

300

33.33%

Practicing DAO cooperativism

PDC

300

1100

27.77%

Cultural patterns and Brand

CPB

150

200

75%

Information & Data Transparency

IDT

600

700

85.71%

DAO2DAO

D2D

200

200

100%

Organizational Technology

OT

300

400

75%

Human-centered Algorithmic Governance

HCAG

200

300

66.66%

Overall

None

2450

4500

54.44%

N/A

None

0

0

0

Radar Chart

Radar Chart for Uniswap

Notes

Rating Process

This was a fun analysis.

I found the search difficulty to be pretty minimal with Uniswap for the majority of the questions (Easy to Medium). Most of Uniswap’s documentation is in a few places so that made it easier to find information to write responses. Additionally, The Collective DAO Archives: Governance Library also helped shorten the time to find some documents.

I am still working on finding a better process to speed up the analysis and provide more information to users of the DAO Index base on Airtable (ratings table, completed questionnaires, documents, snippets).

For this analysis, I created a new Documents table on the DAO Index base, to make it easier to track documents referenced as a source in the response to a question, and to find helpful documents for future reviewers and users of the Airtable base.

The documents referenced for a question are included under the Document field.

Additionally, I also created a Snippets table for specific snippets from a document, referenced in the Documents table, to contextualize a response to a question, in addition to the Explanation field. The snippets referenced for a question are included under the Snippet field.

I found having both the Documents field and Snippets field made it easier to draft a response to a question. Additionally, I think it will make it easier for future users of the Airtable base or completed responses to the Uniswap preliminary analysis to understand why certain responses were or were not given, to use for their own analysis of a DAO with the DAO Index, and to act as an evidence-base for DAOs.

In furtherance of the Documents table acting as an evidence-base, I will add each document’s full-text to the table, either as rich text or a file attachment.

I also found that the Notes field was very helpful in jotting down quick thoughts I could use to respond to a question in the future, and to note down concerns or additional evidence to consider. Additionally, it also makes it easier to remember what I wanted to talk about in this pub.

Docs to Questions Graphic

Model showing relationship between documents, responses, questions, snippets, and principles

Rating Responses

PDC

I found Other Internet’s writings on Uniswap to be helpful in this analysis. Though I responded with a No for PDC-05, I really appreciated Other Internet’s past [1] and ongoing [2] work to develop accountability mechanisms in Uniswap. I expect this response to change to a Yes when I review Uniswap in the future.

BSP

I found BSP-06 to be a tough question to answer. It appears that thre are community moderators on the Uniswap Governance Forum, but I could not find any documents documenting the process of becoming a community moderator.

Additionally, I could not find any dashboards covering voting power and economic inequality indicators in Uniswap. Potentially, Tally could be a resource for finding voting power indicators.

HCAG

Regarding HCAG1, I really liked how Uniswap acknowledges the vulnerabilities of algorithmic governance in HCAG-01. Uniswap mentioned in the Uniswap Docs multiple scenarios where algorithmic governance can suffer from adversarial circumstances [3] (social or technical attacks). I made this page a Guidance link for the question because I think it is such a good example of thinking about issues that can arise with algorithmic governance.

CBC

I could not find much information to indicate how Uniswap governance is represented by members in different countries and geographies.

OT

I was surprised to see that Uniswap does not use any Web3 tech for contribution-tracking (OT-3). I wonder if this will be implemented in the future with an increase in the use of organizational analytics.

IDT

IDA-05 was interesting because I could not find any audit reports directly from Uniswap, but it is clear that Uniswap has audited its tech in the past (V2 of the Uniswap core protocol).

Questions that I could not find a source for

I could not find a definitive source for the following eleven questions:

  1. BSP-01,

  2. BSP-02,

  3. BSP-03,

  4. BSP-10,

  5. CBC-01,

  6. CBC-03,

  7. HCAG-02,

  8. IDA-01,

  9. OT-03,

  10. PDC-06, and

  11. PDC-08.


Feedback & Review

If you are interested in the DAO Index and the analysis of Uniswap, I encourage you to consider reviewing the completed questionnaire (reviewing responses and questions for veracity, language, etc.) or providing other feedback on the analysis of Uniswap.

If you or someone you know is interested, please send me a message on Twitter or via email ([email protected]) and I will add you as an editor to the DAO Index Base table. Otherwise, you can make your own copy of the completed questionnaire and review the responses for:

  1. accuracy (Points and Plain-English),

  2. accuracy and quality (Explanation), and

  3. relevancy and quality (Documents and Snippets).

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