Uniswap Proposal to Airdrop More UNI Falls Short in Governance Vote

The votes were staggeringly in favor, but a quorum was not reached, and Uniswap’s second-ever governance proposal has been defeated.

The proposal, submitted by decentralized finance (DeFi) portal Dharma, was to distribute 400 UNI tokens each to 12,619 addresses that interacted with Uniswap through third-party apps. In a surprise airdrop on Sept. 17, over 250,000 addresses that had directly used the token-swap platform were able to claim 400 free UNI, valued at well over $1,000 at the time.

If this and a follow-on proposal involving decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregators were to have passed, $40 million in additional UNI would’ve been dished out. However, the threshold for a quorum on the current proposal – 40 million voted UNI tokens – fell short by less than 2.5 million.

The vote rallied protocol politicians on both sides of the aisle in recent weeks, with some arguing that further distributions were only fair and others fearful they would depress UNI’s price.

When asked to comment on the results of the vote, Dharma co-founder Brendan Forster told CoinDesk via email:

“We thank the Uniswap community for their engagement over the past 6 weeks. While we are disappointed that Prop 2 didn’t pass, we remain committed to being stewards for the Uniswap ecosystem and will continue to engage in governance for the benefit of all UNI holders.”

Read more: Uniswap’s $40M Governance Vote Closes on Halloween and Some UNI Holders Fear for Price