Dharma’s Uniswap proposal flops as voting threshold wasn’t reached

• Uniswap’s first governance exercises to reduce the threshold has failed.
• The total votes didn’t reach the 40 million threshold required to pass a change into effect.

In the past week, the community members of the leading decentralized exchange (DEX). Uniswap entered the first-ever governance voting exercise for a change in the protocol’s governance thresholds for passing and voting an update into effect. However, the proposal voting, which ended earlier today, has turned out unsuccessful for the exact reason why it was initiated. 

Uniswap first voting didn’t meet the 40 million voting threshold

The just-concluded voting exercise had about 39.5 million votes cast in support of the proposal made by Dharma, an open-source lending protocol. The opposing votes were about 700,000. Regardless of the fact that 98 percent of the votes supported the proposal, it, however, could not be passed into effect because of the supporting votes didn’t reach the 40 million voting threshold.

To propose a change on Uniswap, an individual or entity must have at least 10 million of the protocol’s governance token (UNI), which accounts for about one percent of the token supply in circulation. However, a total of 40 million votes must be made by the community members to determine whether the proposal will be signed into effect or dismissed, which is the reason behind the failure.

Dharma proposed a reduction in the threshold

The proposal by Dharma sought the reduction of Uniswap governance thresholds. If passed, the 10 million UNI required for making proposals would be reduced to 3 million UNI (i.e., about $9 million9). Additionally, the 40 million voting threshold will be reduced to 30 million in order to pass the proposal. 

However, the proposal drew speculations that the change could enable big UNI like Dharma to control the protocol governance easily. Thus, the failure today is quite a good thing for the opposers. 

A disappointing outcome that demonstrates the impetus for the proposal in the first-place:

Despite the vote having 85+% turnout (!), >95% support, with 272 voting FOR and 48 voting AGAINST, the vote still failed.

There is a silver lining, though… https://t.co/iXZgwxC5da

— Nadav from Dharma (@NadavAHollander) October 19, 2020