Decentralized exchange Uniswap goes live with a governance token, dubbed UNI

Uniswap has officially gone live with its governance token, dubbed UNI.

One billion tokens have been minted, according to a blog post, which will become available over a four-year period. 60% of that amount will be allocated to community members and 21.51% to "team members and future employees." 17.80% of tokens will be allocated to do investors with a four-year vesting schedule, and 0.069% will be allocated to advisors with a four-year vesting cycle.

"A perpetual inflation rate of 2% per year will start after 4 years, ensuring continued participation and contribution to Uniswap at the expense of passive UNI holders," the post explains.

The post positioned the UNI as the next step for a fast-growing protocol, noting the DEX's rapidly expanding volume and liquidity figures.

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"Having proven product-market fit for highly decentralized financial infrastructure with a platform that has thrived independently, Uniswap is now particularly well positioned for community-led growth, development, and self-sustainability," the team wrote. "The introduction of UNI (ERC-20) serves this purpose, enabling shared community ownership and a vibrant, diverse, and dedicated governance system, which will actively guide the protocol towards the future."

The post went on to state:

"Uniswap has always embraced the tenets of neutrality and trust minimization : it is crucial that governance is constrained to where it is strictly necessary. With this in mind, the Uniswap governance framework is limited to contributing to both protocol development and usage as well as development of the broader Uniswap ecosystem. In doing so, UNI officially enshrines Uniswap as publicly-owned and self-sustainable infrastructure while continuing to carefully protect its indestructible and autonomous qualities."

As noted by some eagle-eyed observers on social media, a retroactive distribution of UNI tokens — some 150 million tokens — has begun, being directed toward "historical liquidity providers, users, and SOCKS redeemers/holders based on a snapshot ending September 1, 2020, at 12:00 am UTC." Some 49 million UNI to historical liquidity provider is being directed to historical liquidity providers.

"With 15 % of tokens already available to be claimed by historical users and liquidity providers, the governance treasury will retain 43% [430,000,000 UNI] of UNI supply to distribute on an ongoing basis through contributor grants, community initiatives, liquidity mining, and other programs," the blog post noted.