Today we’re pleased to present the Uniswap Grants Program’s first retrospective report to highlight the incredible work done by grantees over the past 1.5 years.

Since UGP’s launch, it has deployed ~$7M in $UNI to 122 grantees. As you’ll read below, grantees have ranged from open-source development teams, to grassroots community organizers, and to applied research organizations. Their resulting work has included 4 successful governance proposals, pro-tooling serving thousands of LPs, a globally attended hackathon resulting in ~100 projects, and much more.

When we published the original UGP proposal, we set out on a mission to provide valuable resources to grow the Uniswap ecosystem. Today we are excited to showcase the tangible impact of our grantees on ecosystem governance, growth, and sustainability.

We have also thought deeply about the evolution of UGP, and how the program can expand to more effectively serve, support, and grow the ecosystem.

First, let’s review a macro breakdown of UGP:

UGP Macro Breakdown

UGP has funded a diverse and global array of projects. The largest three categories of projects by number and allocation were Sponsorships, Tooling, and Community.

Over 1.5 years, we funded 8 waves of grants

We also supported grantees globally - not only in the US but also across the UK, India, Singapore, Canada, China, Europe and Asia. We also, of course, supported our global anon community.

Below, we highlight some (of many!) successes from UGP grantees across four core themes:

1. Community growth and support
2. Productive, engaged governance
3. User interfaces
4. Developer tooling

You can check out the complete list of UGP grantees here (kudos to @sovereignsignal for compiling!).

Community growth and support

UGP’s work has shepherded new developers and users into the ecosystem through projects like:

• Unicode Hackathon, which attracted 351 global hackers across 96 projects, some of which are still actively being worked on, including:
  • Caravan, a platform for renting liquidity (fun fact: a cofounder of Caravan is now an intern at Uniswap Labs! 🦄)
  • Righttoken, a monetization platform for artists
  • Cargo.finance, an LP management tool
• Rabbithole quests, brought ~4,000 verified unique wallets to use Uniswap for the first time, LPing and swapping on Ethereum L2s
• Gitcoin CLR rounds, empowered the community to direct $700k in matched funding to support 10 new projects that had not received or qualified for a UGP grant (like revert.finance)
• Team Secret partnership, the first DAO-eSports sponsorship, to produce Uniswap education and activations. This is an ongoing initiative and we’re excited for it to continue to evolve

Its work has also supported the existing community, for instance through funding:

• Serv.eth, a 24/7 Uniswap Discord support staff of 10 which has resolved over 15,000 community support tickets assisting users in everything from connecting their wallet to rescuing funds from scammers
• Shields, headless branding implementation for Uniswap community identity which evolved into its own collaborative NFT project

On our mission towards greater decentralization, we recognize the importance of funding new subcommittees to focus their efforts on more specific target areas for growth, and are pleased that these groups deployed over 50+ bounties and grants to ~100 analysts, developers, and community members. These included:

• UGP Community Analytics (UGPCA), which focuses on attracting and supporting data analysts and building out robust data dashboards for the broader community (check them out here!). UGPCA has organized 14 unique challenges and awarded $40k+ so far in bounties to 60+ analysts working across different data sources and platforms including Dune, Flipside, Mirror, Footprint Analytics, and more
• The Stable, which focuses on empowering individual creators to build community support tools such as a Uniswap newsletter, Uniswap governance bot, scam bot, and spam alerts. The Stable has supported 40 grantees with $150k in grants

We are also proud to have supported the broader Ethereum and web3 ecosystems. Uniswap would not exist without support from the Ethereum community (check out Uniswap’s initial EF grant here). We gave to the Ethereum Execution Layer Fundraise to support Ethereum client diversity, alongside Compound Grants, Synthetix, The Graph, and other community stakeholders.

We also strongly believe in the importance of growing the size and diversity of the Ethereum developer community, and as such we have supported:

• A DeFi Developer Course created by Pursuit, a leading organization focused on creating economic opportunity, to help BIPOC and under-served populations break into web3
• A Solidity Bootcamp with TechEducators, whose efforts resulting from the UGP grant were subsequently recognized by and now financially supported by the UK government
• Expanding crypto communities across Uganda, Argentina, Russia, Croatia, and Czech Republic

Supporting productive, engaged governance

UGP has also supported a number of grants devoted to improving community governance. This includes support for an array of teams and individuals focused on improving the governance process and proposals, such as:

• Other Internet, an applied research organization, which has assisted multiple proposers in crafting governance proposals, and published 3 comprehensive reports on Uniswap governance, the broader community, and the biggest challenges facing both
• GFX Labs, a crypto products and research studio, received a grant to conduct cross-chain governance research
• Jeremy Guzman, governance champion research focused on the creation of veUNI and new token utility
• Blacksage, governance champion research focused on establishing novel voting mechanisms

And the well-researched, high impact proposals they helped craft and support through approval, including:

Adding support for 1bp fee tier pools on Polygon (where Uniswap v3 is now the #8 most popular DEX). This is the first Uniswap proposal governing a deployment on another chain. These pools on Polygon make up ~15% TVL since their launch, and have generated $6M+ in revenue for LPs. This proposal was crafted by GFX Labs.

Since the 1bp fee tier launch, Uniswap’s Polygon DEX marketshare increased from ~50% to ~60%+. The v3 deployment is still new to Polygon and we may not be able to attribute this growth to the fee tier, however this initial datapoint is positive.

• Deploying Uniswap v3 on Moonbeam - inspired by the vision for a multichain Uniswap, this proposal authorized a v3 deployment on Moonbeam, a Polkadot parachain which has become a DeFi hub, and has 100+ projects building on it. This proposal also committed the Moonbeam Foundation to a $2.5M donation to UGP to support research and development of Uniswap deployments across different chains and scaling solutions (both current and future). Other Internet supported Blockchain at Berkeley and Nomad in crafting this proposal.
• Supporting the Nomic Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to developer tooling for Ethereum from the creators of Hardhat, a widely used developer tool used to build Uniswap, among many other widely used DeFi protocols. This proposal contributed funding alongside the EF, Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase, Consensys, and more. Other Internet supported the Nomic Foundation throughout the governance process.

UGP is also committed to improving the governance process, and as such has funded governance tooling to improve delegate/voter experience and has introduced changes to make the protocol more secure. These include:

• Productionization and maintenance of Seatbelt by Scopelift, a test suite for governance proposals tool, which has since been forked by Aave and OpenZeppelin. Uniswap Labs wrote about its integration into Uniswap governance here
• Uni.vote, which allows for gasless voting and delegation by Arr00 and Anish

New user interfaces

UGP also supported the creation of new interfaces for the wide array of stakeholders who use Uniswap - from DAOs to sophisticated LPs to complete beginners.

Many interfaces focused on pro users, include:

• Defi Lab: an LP tool with a simulator and backtester with more than 3,000 monthly users
• APY.vision: pro interface to track LP positions and historical performance, comparisons to similar pools, and ability to deploy LP based on research
• Yewbow: a pro interface for quant strategies and more advanced swappers

UGP has also supported the development of tools for beginners and general retail users, such as:

• Seedle: a liquidity pool management tool currently serving ~2000 daily unique users
• SimpleFi: a beginner interface for understanding and deploying liquidity pools

Developer Tooling

Developer tooling was by far the most popular category for funding, with 29 grants. These mean that developers can choose amongst a wider variety of programming languages to build projects on top of Uniswap and use tailor made tools for quicker implementation and testing.

Some of the tools built include:

• The open source, and now canonical, v3 Liquidity Mining contracts. These have been merged into the Uniswap core repo (250+ Github stars, 100+ forks)
• Uniswap Simple SDK, a plug and play package to easily integrate the Uniswap router (120+ stars, 50+ forks)
• Pyexchange v3 client: a Python library using maker syntax (70+ stars, 50+ forks)
• V3 TWAP Plugin tooling: Hardhat plugin to configure V3 TWAP prices in local mainnet test environments
• uniswappeR: R library to interact, trade, and more easily manipulate trade data pulled from graphql db

We celebrate the success of all UGP grantees, not just those highlighted above. Any success that the UGP enjoys is only because of their hard work and ingenuity.

Over the past year and a half, we have also learned that there is still a tremendous opportunity to better support Uniswap. As we consider the next iteration of UGP, we believe we have to grow beyond providing grants, and build out infrastructure that can better empower, grow, diversify, and adapt to the ever changing needs of all Uniswap community stakeholders. This may take the form of a larger grants program…. or a Foundation 👀

Thank you to everyone who has supported UGP over the past year and a half. We would not be here without you, and look forward to continuing to collaborate in the years to come!

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Special thanks to Jesse Walden, Fede, YJ, Boris, Lawrence & the OmniAnalytics Team, and especially Devin Walsh for your help in creating this Retro. Also shoutout for Sovereign Signal’s deep dive into UGP last week, which serves as a great complement to this report - check it out here!