Was The Uniswap Airdrop Fair? Dharma, 1inch.exchange Have a Few Suggestions

DeFi wallet Dharma is spearheading a proposal for Uniswap to expand the scope of its token airdrop to addresses that used the DEX indirectly. While rewarding all of Uniswap’s users is an optimal scenario, certain drawbacks make this tough to enact.

Two Sides to the Uniswap Airdrop

While DeFi users reveled in joy at the sight of 400 free UNI tokens, DEX aggregators and their customers are displeased with the airdrop. Uniswap’s distribution was designed to provide every address that interacted with the network 400 UNI.

But this was only for users that directly interacted with the DEX’s smart contracts.

Unfortunately, users of aggregators like 1inch and Paraswap weren’t eligible for the airdropped reward. Aggregators use proxy contracts to tap into Uniswap’s liquidity, which means their users never directly interacted with the contracts.

Dharma, a product that makes it easy for users to interface with DeFi, is leading the charge to rectify this “oversight.”

1/ We’d like to congratulate the @UniswapProtocol team and applaud $UNI‘s distribution, rewarding early users and supporters.

However, the distribution unfortunately excludes a subset of Uniswap users, including Dharma users, due to what we believe was an unintended oversight.

— Dharma (@Dharma_HQ) September 17, 2020

Nadav Hollander, CEO of Dharma, submitted a proposal on the Uniswap governance forum to consider rewarding addresses that used Uniswap via proxy contracts. In the thread, 1inch CEO Sergej Kunz sounded support for the proposal, saying, “we provided huge volume to Uniswap and our users are now asking for the UNI token.”

It’s a fair point. Aggregators have been a boon to DEXes like Uniswap, bringing in more users and utilizing the exchange’s liquidity. The best-case scenario is for all users of Uniswap to equally take part in the upside.

However, this is not simple to execute.

According to Hayden Adams, inventor of Uniswap, rewarding all users that interacted with Proxy contracts would result in Dharma and DEX aggregator users receiving a minuscule share of the reward. The real winners would be arbitrageurs, who use a similar structure to interact with Uniswap.

If the proposal were to go through voting, the platform’s newly-elected governance community would need to approve the transfer of tokens from the community treasury to Dharma, 1inch, and other whitelisted projects.

As always, two prevailing precedents play out depending on the result of the proposal. If the vote fails, it sends a message to projects building on Uniswap that the community doesn’t value them and that retroactive decisions will not fly.

If it does go through, builders and indirect users will be loyal to Uniswap, but it opens the door to more such retrospective action. There are merits and drawbacks on either side. All that’s left is for the community to put the proposal to vote and decide the future course of action.