Senior executives' compensation at Uniswap Foundation accounts for 30% of annual expenditures, sparking community doubts about its DAO governance model

Recently, PaperImperium posted on the X platform, revealing details of Uniswap Foundation's 2024 expenditures and sharply questioning its operational efficiency, leading to widespread discussions on decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance and funding efficiency.

The core data of the report points directly to a serious imbalance in its foundation’s expenditure structure. Uniswap Foundation's total expenditure in 2024 is approximately $12.8 million, of which $4.8 million is allocated to employee salaries. Notably, the salaries of three executives amount to $3.87 million, nearly 30% of the total expenditure. Meanwhile, the annual ecosystem funding is only about $10 million, just over twice the executives’ salaries.

This expenditure structure has raised industry concerns about “high pay and low efficiency.” Analysis indicates that, as a reference, the larger-budget Optimism Grants Council spent only about $2.6 million on salaries during the same period, but managed a funding budget of up to $63.5 million.

In other words, the salary costs for the three Uniswap Foundation executives are almost equal to the entire funding budget of the Optimism team, yet the total funding they have implemented is only 20% of Optimism’s. This efficiency gap has triggered fundamental questions within the community about the management costs of the Uniswap Foundation and the alignment with ecological value.

Overall, the core issue of this incident goes far beyond the specific salary figures; it touches on the deeper question of governance in decentralized organizations within the crypto space.

Under the DAO governance model, due to the lack of traditional corporate transparency, accountability performance constraints, and incentive mechanisms linked to ecological contributions, community funds may not be efficiently and fairly used to promote protocol development, but mainly for internal management.

Currently, this controversy has fermented within the Uniswap community, and it is expected to exert direct pressure on future budget proposals and governance models of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) foundation.

#Uniswap基金会 #DAO governance