Uniswap Foundation gets 99% vote approval, but was this a “whale run?”

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  • After weeks of voting from the Uniswap community, garnering 99 percent approval votes, the Uniswap Foundation is set to be a reality.
  • Some community members have expressed concern that the voting outcome was a “whale run” with top addresses accounting for the highest percentage.

The world’s largest decentralized exchange (DEX) by trading volume, is setting up the Uniswap Foundation. This comes after 99 percent (86M) voting approval from the community. According to the first proposal, Uniswap Foundation will streamline the project’s grants program and “reinvigorate governance.”

Voting began on August 17 after the foundation was dreamt up by two former Uniswap Lab executives. With the Foundation set to spend $74 million to actualize, it initially received mixed reactions. The funds will be withdrawn from the Uniswap DAO treasury, which holds over $3 billion worth of UNI. The Foundation will be headed by Ken Ng who plans to lead a team of 12. The Uniswap Foundation plans on distributing $60 million to the Uniswap Grant Program (UGP) and $14 million to cover operation costs.

Even now that the proposal is approved, some are still criticizing the decision. Not only has the amount to be spent by the foundation raised issue, but the nature of the voting has also been critical. According to one Twitter user, the top 20 addresses voted with 81.57 million, about 99.7 percent of the total tokens.

For now, the proposal is a go. In fact, Devin Walsh says that they have already hit the ground running. In a tweeter thread, he noted;

We have already hit the ground running on our top priorities:
Interviewing talented, values-aligned candidates to join the UF team
Scaling up UGP (keep an eye out for Grants Wave 9 announcement next month👀)
Reinvigorating governance (look for forum discussions soon👀)

Following the announcement, Uniswap (UNI) has recorded a marginal jump. At the time of press, the digital asset is up by 2 percent and is trading above $7.

Related: Uniswap confirms a phishing attack on the exchange, denies threat to protocol security