Prelude: I stayed up last night writing because I needed to rant about the deluge of SBF content taking away from far more interesting (and important) content like Uniswap’s new fee. I woke up and the Chopping Block podcast scooped my hot take – and – as you might expect, they offered far more insight and insider information ;)

Hopefully, this offers a unique if more idealistic portrait. I promise at least one extra take in there – TL;DR Uniswap Protocol should acquire Uniswap Labs and turn it into a protocol sub-DAO.

I have a confession to make. Eric Voorhees' phenomenal opening speech at Permissionless 2023 didn't move me. Eloquent content from a brilliant leader delivered perfectly, but just not something I agree with. It’s not the first time. I can remember being fortunate enough to catch the virtuosic Andreas Antonopoulos red pill a room back when you could get bitcoins for well under a thousand bucks. Certainly, I was hooked. But the libertarian dream of having only digital rules, and having no need for central banks, “no limits” and “no oversight” wasn’t for me. Maybe I have only studied enough economics to find it hard to dislodge the idea that central banks provide a degree of order. For example, we all know what a recession used to be called – a depression. Do you know what it was called before that? A panic. At the end of the day, I just can’t help imagining libertarians being raided by goons the second their dream is tested. My idealized version of things would see a small but highly principled and powerful government that acts like a caboose on a train. A government that can only apply the brakes for the most part. I want FedEx and UPS competing to create something better than the USPS. But I want a strong government with smart regulations to ensure mail is still delivered to parts of the country that might not be as profitable. (An interesting tidbit is that trains eventually evolved to have brakes on all cars (making the caboose obsolete!))

I said idealized because democracy is hard, and regulations are delicate flowers. Bill Gurley’s viral All-In talk about telecom regulatory capture is a case in point. Worse yet, we have shadowy super-regulators like Elizabeth Warren recklessly choking out the entire blockchain industry. How in the world can Elizabeth Warren not see the potential of programmable value?!?! It is so painfully ironic that someone who has made a name for themselves as a consumer protector is trying to kill the thing most likely to protect consumers. But I guess we can’t always see the important things happening right in front of us.

Take, for example, the entire crypto industry being unable to stop talking about SBF. Meanwhile, something infinitely more important is relegated to second-page news: Uniswap turning on fees. I am sorry, but this is the crypto news that matters most. Like the unfolding of MakerDAO’s Endgame and the Nouns DAO fork, Uniswap turning on fees is the next page in the thriller. These are the very first breaths of the baby that will evolve capitalism. And, if this doesn’t seem important to you let me say that I believe DAOs are our best chance to fix climate change and other wicked problems like wealth disparity and equal access to opportunity. Yes, DAOs! As better governance tooling and shared best practices emerge and people improve how they co-optimize for centralization and decentralization, DAOs will evolve capitalism. This is the promise of programmable value. This makes the Uniswap Fees debate the front line of humanity’s brightest future.

Here’s the hot take: Uniswap Labs should be acquired by $UNI holders. Uniswap Labs should be a (probably) centralized (certainly) subservient sub-organization (sub-DAO is too prescriptive a term here) of the protocol. Right now, it's the other way around. Uniswap Labs and their investors control Uniswap, the protocol. By turning on a fee switch for the Uniswap Labs’ front end they will generate tens of millions a year. In doing so, they immediately wiped out hundreds of millions of $UNI value. When a group oversees shareholder and token value simultaneously, somebody loses.

It’s forgivable that Uniswap is in this place. It is a bear market, and they had their hands tied by outrageous and unconstitutional accredited investor laws. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Warren was the mama bear that would fix ICO regulations? If she did, in time, I think she’d be helping the string play out until all the largest public companies are acquired by DAOs with governance-only tokens. I realize this is hand-wavey, but you can imagine a new class of workers who act as representatives and vote your tokens for you. You can imagine this as an extension of democracy. We have a long way to go here but think of where this could end up. Have you ever wondered if big holding companies like Yum! Brands and Omnicom Group should be throwing off profit. Is growth for the sake of growth healthy? Isn’t this growth just an engine for broadening wealth disparity? What if these massive DAOs (with top-tier exec teams and “sub-Orgs”) were to focus on being regenerative public goods? This could happen through competition, regulation, or some mix of these. Now within those public goods, in order to optimize how work is done, DAOs would empower profit-seeking intra-DAO-organizations often leveraging smart contracts (and more) to unlock ephemeral alignments and other emergent forms of centralization we can only imagine (e.g. AI). Competition when useful. Utilities when more appropriate. Programmable value might allow for wildly different simultaneous centralizations from microeconomic agents, ad hoc projects, and massive service DAOs. Programmable value stands to evolve capitalism and it is fascinating. Let’s flip the channel from SBF-TV to the Uniswap Fees debate .

OK, I’m a little over my skis here, but hopefully, you are tracking. Hopefully, you can see why I am here.

I am here for programmable value.