Decentralized exchange Uniswap launches UNI community governance token

Uniswap has officially launched its community governance token, dubbed UNI.

According to a blog post , Uniswap has minted one billion tokens to be used over four years. 60% of them will be allocated to community members, 21.51% will be allocated to "team members and future employees." 17.80% of the tokens will be allocated to investors with a four-year vesting schedule, and 0.069% of the tokens will be allocated to advisors with a four-year vesting cycle.

“After four years, a permanent inflation rate of 2% per year will begin to occur, ensuring continued participation and contribution to Uniswap at the expense of passive UNI holders,” the post explained.

The post positions UNI as the next step in a rapidly evolving protocol, noting that the DEX has seen rapid growth in volume and liquidity.

“With a mature product-market fit for highly decentralized financial infrastructure and an independently evolving platform, Uniswap is now uniquely positioned for community-led growth, development, and self-sustainability,” the team wrote. “The introduction of UNI (ERC-20) serves this purpose, enabling shared community ownership and a vibrant, diverse, and dedicated governance system that will actively guide the protocol into the future.”

The post goes on to state:

“Uniswap has always been guided by the principles of neutrality and trust minimization: it is critical that governance is constrained to where strictly necessary. With this in mind, the Uniswap governance framework is limited to contributions to protocol development and usage, as well as development. In this context, UNI formally classifies Uniswap as publicly owned and self-sustainable infrastructure, while continuing to carefully protect its unbreakable and autonomous qualities.”

As noted by some professional observers on social media, a retroactive distribution of UNI tokens (approximately 150 million tokens) has already begun, directed to “historical liquidity providers, users, and SOCKS redeemers/holders based on a snapshot as of September 1, 2020, 12:00 AM UTC.” Approximately 49 million UNI are being directed to historical liquidity providers.

The post states that “With 15% of tokens already available for claiming by historical users and liquidity providers, the governance fund will retain 43% [430,000,000 UNI] of the UNI supply and distribute it on an ongoing basis through contributor grants, community initiatives, liquidity mining, and other means.”