Supporting Tally’s Development and Enhancements for Uniswap DAO Governance

Summary

Tally has been actively supporting Uniswap DAO since December 2020, less than 3 months after the UNI token was launched in September 2020. We are excited to continue building for the Uniswap DAO by enhancing the governance experience and rolling out key developments to further strengthen the Uniswap DAO’s onchain governance infrastructure. To continue providing these services and pursue future improvements, we are requesting $250,000 annually for 2 years.

Motivation

Tally is the leading interface for Uniswap DAO’s onchain governance. Over the past 6 months, 75% of Uniswap DAO’s proposals were created on Tally with an average of 55.2% of onchain votes being cast on Tally.

Tally has been deeply engaged with the Uniswap DAO, providing essential governance infrastructure that has enabled its success. Our goal is to further enhance Uniswap’s governance capabilities and create an even better experience for the community.

Tally’s importance has grown over time, as Uniswap Labs has stopped maintaining Sybil.org and removed voting from the app.uniswap.org interface. We believe it’s important for the decentralization of the DAO to have many great interfaces for governance. The best way to ensure that is to fund them.

We believe the DAO should have the flexibility to allocate resources to the governance platform that best serves the DAO’s needs. Many DAO contributors and delegates have expressed support for using multiple governance interfaces. The Uniswap Foundation engaged Agora for a similar-sized grant. Tally plays a critical role in Uniswap DAO governance—currently it is the only platform that allows for the creation of proposals in the Uniswap DAO (all other proposals are created via command line). Tally’s no-code proposal tools, including the ability to create private drafts of proposals to be shared and edited among delegates, are highly popular with Uniswap proposal creators.

Proposal Details

We are seeking this grant to:

1. Ensure Tally can continue supporting the Uniswap DAO’s governance needs with the same level of commitment.
2. Develop new features and improvements that will make participation in Uniswap DAO governance more accessible and effective.
3. Build a stronger, more seamless user experience tailored to the growing needs of the Uniswap DAO community.

Our focus is on the future. With this grant, we plan to build out features that will create a deeper, more robust governance experience—one that scales with Uniswap’s growth and helps contributors make impactful decisions.

(1) The Uniswap DAO relies on Tally for governance.

Tally is the preferred governance platform for Uniswap DAO delegates and contributors, providing a simple and efficient way to vote, delegate, and participate in governance discussions. Uniswap DAO members consistently use Tally to engage in the decision-making process. As the DAO grows, Tally continues to play a critical role in facilitating transparent and effective governance.

Tally is the most popular onchain governance platform in the Uniswap DAO, and it’s becoming more popular over time.

Recent governance proposals and the percentage of votes that took place on Tally include:

In total, Uniswap contributors use Tally for both proposal creation and proposal drafting:

• 80 created proposals
• 67 non-test drafts

(2) Tally has consistently rolled out key features and improvements that have enhanced the governance experience for Uniswap DAO. These include:

• UNI Staking Support: Launched on August 16, 2024, allowing Uniswap DAO members to stake UNI directly on Tally.
• Gasless Delegation: Since May 2023, Tally has relayed delegation transactions for the Uniswap DAO via its funded budget, making delegation free for Uniswap DAO members.
• Import from Discourse & Snapshot: Seamless import of proposals from Discourse or Snapshot with just a link, ensuring a smooth proposal drafting experience.
• Secure Voting Mechanisms: Providing a reliable voting platform that empowers token holders to make decisions securely and transparently.
• Proposal Automation: Automating the execution of approved proposals to simplify governance.
• Proposal Creation with Arbitrary Executables: Proposals can be created with customizable executable actions, including a custom “recipe” in Tally’s docs for chain deployment of Uniswap v3.
• Collaborative Proposal Drafting: Enabling multiple contributors to draft proposals together for a more inclusive governance process.
• No-Code Transfers: Making fund transfers within the DAO simple and accessible to non-technical users.
• Notifications: Keeping Uniswap DAO members informed with real-time email notifications on proposal voting windows.
• Gnosis Safe Integration: Allowing for efficient, secure management of DAO assets.
• Wallet Support: Native support for a wide range of wallets so DAO participation is accessible to all Uniswap DAO members.
• Public API: Enabling deeper integration with Uniswap’s ecosystem through Tally’s comprehensive public API.

(3) Tally has an exciting roadmap for Uniswap DAO coming up.

Tally needs you, the DAO participant, to help shape the future of Uniswap DAO’s governance tooling. We would like to offer a monthly office hours as an open feedback session for Uniswap DAO contributors to suggest new features and contribute to our roadmap. We receive a lot of inbound from Uniswap DAO contributors in informal settings and we would like to open this process up to the DAO in a more formal way.

Governance Improvements on Roadmap

Looking ahead, Tally has many new features on its roadmap that may further elevate the Uniswap DAO’s governance experience. Some features and products on our roadmap that may be interesting to the Uniswap DAO community include:

• Staking: Tally has built tooling and interfaces to support Uniswap UniStaker. We plan to also build out infrastructure for supporting native staking on Unichain UVN nodes.
• Gasless Voting: Similar to gasless delegation already in operation, Tally will stand up a relayer—to be funded by the Uniswap DAO— to relay voting transactions through Tally, making voting free for DAO members.
• Forum Bot: Tally’s forum bot can post on the Uniswap DAO Discourse forum when voting starts and ends on the corresponding proposal.
• Optimistic Governance: Tally is building a council-based Governor, which will allow a council to share control over a protocol and/or treasury. It’s based on the similar Governor contract, but proposals are passed by a council’s votes instead of by token voting.
• UI Support for Uniswap Accountability Committee: Tally will provide a UI to display Uniswap Accountability Committee membership and transactions on DAO Home page.

Tally will provide a quarterly report for the Uniswap DAO, detailing key achievements, including uptime metrics, notes from Community Calls, support metrics, as well as enhancements to the Uniswap DAO’s governance on Tally (as outlined above).

Budget and Timeline

Budget:

• $250,000 annually for 2 years
• The Uniswap DAO will transfer $500,000 USD of UNI to the Uniswap Accountability Committee (UAC). The UAC will pay Tally quarterly at the start of each quarter $62,500 USD in UNI for the next 8 quarters.
• Our original proposal on Snapshot requested a 50% buffer in funds to account for price volatility, we have not included that in the onchain proposal and instead we will ask that Uniswap Accountability Committee have the right to request additional funds from the DAO in the event that price volatility means funds run out earlier than expected.

Proposal Timeline:

• Post RFC for community feedback
• Incorporate feedback, hold Snapshot vote
• Onchain proposal to approve and allocate funding to [RFC] Supporting Tally’s Continued Development and Enhancements for Uniswap DAO Governance

KPIs

Tally will provide a quarterly report for the Uniswap DAO, detailing key achievements, including uptime metrics, notes from Community Calls, support metrics, as well as enhancements to the Uniswap DAO’s governance on Tally (as outlined above).

• Tally usage
  • We will continue to track the number of proposals and % of votes per proposal made on Tally and report on those to the DAO.
• Roadmap feature usage
  • As we roll out new features for the Uniswap DAO, we will track usage of those features and report on them to the DAO.
• Monthly office hours
  • An open feedback session for Uniswap DAO contributors to suggest new features and contribute to our roadmap
• Uptime and Availability
  • System Uptime: 99% monthly uptime, ensuring the system is accessible with minimal disruptions.
  • Scheduled Downtime: Maximum of 2% monthly allowance for scheduled maintenance, communicated in advance.
• Response and Resolution Time
  • Incident Response Time: Initial response within 4 hours for high-priority incidents (e.g., outages) during working hours in the United States, and 24 hours for incidents outside of working hours and low-priority issues.
  • Resolution Time: Resolution or workaround within 8 hours for high-priority incidents (e.g., outages) during working hours in the United States, and 24 hours for incidents outside of working hours.
• Maintenance and Support
  • Bug Resolution: Resolution of non-critical bugs within 5 business days and critical bugs within 1 business day. For bugs that are not possible to resolve in this time frame, a post-mortem analysis to be shared with the DAO following resolution.
  • Regular Maintenance Updates: Regular monthly maintenance updates, including minor upgrades, patches, and performance improvements.