Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Ungovernable Podcast Ep. 10 – Callen Van Den Elst
Recorded: March 19, 2025 Duration: 1:06:35Space Recording
Short Summary
The latest episode of the Ungovernable Podcast dives deep into the evolving landscape of DeFi governance, featuring insights from Callan Van Den Elst of Wintermute. Key topics include the growth of decentralized finance, the importance of community involvement in DAOs, and the strategic initiatives of Uniswap, including the ambitious Uniswap Unleashed project.
Full Transcription
So So So I'm going to be doing a little bit of a dance. I'm going to be doing a little bit of a
dance.
I'm going to be doing a little bit of a
dance.
I'm going to be doing a little bit of a
dance.
I'm going to be doing a little bit of a
dance.
I'm going to be doing a little bit of a
dance.
I'm going to be doing a little bit of a dance. 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 아 I'm gonna go to the bathroom. I'm gonna go to the bathroom.
I'm gonna go to the bathroom.
I'm gonna go to the bathroom.
I'm gonna go to the bathroom.
I'm gonna go to the bathroom.
I'm gonna to be. So The I'm I'm going to do a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a
little bit of a little bit of a I'm The Join the ungovernable. No filters, no apologies. This season we're cracking open Uniswap governance.
Welcome to a new episode of the Ungovernable Podcast.
And we're live. How we going guys? Welcome to a new episode of the Ungovernable
Podcast. Today we have Callan Van Den Elst, DeFi envoy at Wintermute
and a leading voice in Dow governance.
Callan, you've been instrumental in bridging the gap
between TradFi and the Wild West that is crypto.
You also lead Wintermute's governance arm,
shaping governance strategies across protocols
like Uniswap, Aave, Compound, Lido, among many others.
We are Joe and Austin from Alpha Growth,
your premier DeFi ops and growth firm.
Kalan, thank you for joining us.
What else should everybody know about you?
Hey guys, thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
I think you covered it pretty well,
but yeah, I lead governance at Wintermute
and kind of handle a lot of our public involvement
across many DAOs.
Beautiful. Well, start at the beginning, man. How'd you get into crypto?
I think I feel like I have a probably a very similar story to like many others.
It started in 2017.
I had a friend that kind of got involved at the very early stages, made quite a
bit of money, got pretty interested from that,
went through the whole 2017 kind of bull and bear market.
And then I think 2020, when DeFi came around,
I got like super interested in DeFi,
continued to read all the white papers during that period
and get like quite involved.
And naturally as DeFi progressed and we saw DAOs come alive,
I began sort of participating in forums anonymously.
And that's how I kind of transitioned from, you know,
just being someone who was, I guess,
trading shit coins to being a bit more involved in the industry and caring a bit
more about like what DeFi actually means. I think yeah pretty similar story we've heard that's classic but it sounds
like you've been been around for quite a while so that's that's great excited to hear some of your
perspectives today. How would you say your traditional finance education has shaped how
you approach DeFi and crypto markets? Yeah well well, I mean, I wouldn't say I have traditional finance experience in the classical sense.
So, like, for example, I joined Winsor & Mutes straight out of university, but I would say,
I guess, most of how my decisions are made are kind of fundamentally coming from,
you know, the courses that I studied at university. I did four years of economics at an honors level with like a heavy
focus on econometrics and like quant methods and micro econometrics. So this these sort
of subjects kind of really go deep into how people behave under incentives and kind of
optimal ways to think about things and progress through different strategies.
And I would say that's like where most of my experience and decision making would come from and how that is applied to DeFi.
And I think honestly, like, I really didn't expect what I studied at university to have such a big translation to crypto.
But fundamentally, they are very, very similar, which is like awesome.
Yeah, and was there like a particular moment, you know, when you were working like on the forums in the in the DAOs
that you really wanted to build your career around of an instant and kind of working with DAOs? I think like ultimately for me,
it was after spending a few years in crypto already
and seeing DeFi come alive,
I understood that I kind of really wanted to work
in the crypto industry.
And then when this role, I guess at Winsmute popped up,
it already had a lot of kind of requirements that
I had done just through like personal experience participating in forums. Like for example, you
know, I kind of approached many dais to get certain collateral assets listed on these protocols,
specifically something like Maker. And then I was also heavily involved in like providing feedback
on supposedly like tokenomics or
the way certain protocols handle, I guess, like their treasury and their income from
fees.
So at that point, it was kind of like a natural progression when the role at Wintermute came
up because it was already things that I was kind of doing in my spare time as a hobby,
which is like perfect.
Oh, that's awesome.
And I guess what gets you most excited about
like working with DAOs as well.
I think sometimes people from the outside
see all these long form posts
and kind of see it as like daunting.
And if you're doing this as like a hobby,
would love to hear what you get most excited about.
I think like, yeah, the one thing that really, really made me excited to kind
of be working in this space is like, despite being stay a small token holder,
if you can come up with idea that is like clearly beneficial to a protocol
or token holders, there's like a very, very good chance that this proposal
could be implemented into like
this DAO protocol. So you can actually have a voice, you know, without having like a crazy
amount of capital behind you. And I think that's something that's like truly powerful
and something that's like really only enabled within like the defined DAO ecosystem.
I 100% agree. I think it's in a perfect world. Everything is meritocratic. And although we
don't live in a perfect world, I think so far we've seen at least quite a few of the
Dows that are properly decentralized. I think they've enabled that, which has been very,
very cool to see that even like you said, a small voice that, you know, financially might
not be very powerful in an ecosystem. If their voice is loud enough and they have good enough ideas,
they can make something happen.
And that doesn't really happen that way with governments in general.
It's pretty a black box. Um, okay. So DeFi Envoy,
uh, am I saying that word right? Envoy, Envoy. How do you say it?
Yeah. Yeah. It's, I say Envoy But yeah, I think it's, yeah, fine.
Either way. Tell us a little bit about this role. What does it actually entail?
And how might it differ from traditional positions at a firm?
Yeah, sure. So I guess like a bit of backstory. So originally, before I joined Wintermute,
as a liquidity provider in the DeFi space, Wintermute
had to interact with the DAOs when they were dealing with public treasuries, when they
were seeking out liquidity provision deals.
And so these partnerships are very public and you had to have someone in the forums
kind of initiating these discussions so it could go through the correct methods.
And funnily enough, this was originally handled by our CEO of Geni,
who was in the forums, like he was quite an avid forum reader, enjoyed it.
And so yeah, he was handling all these like communications between
Wintermute and the DAOs.
And like naturally he was like, okay, maybe we should get, you know,
another person in here to kind of take over and expand this
and do this at a bit more of a high level
where he can continue to focus, I guess,
on the rest of Wintermute.
And so DeFi Envoy, the name kind of stems from that.
And it's really just like a description of Wintermute
having a person that is able to interact very publicly with a lot
of protocols that we deal with, a lot of DAOs that we deal with across DeFi. And I guess
I wouldn't be able to give you a clear example of how this might differ from like traditional
finance. I guess maybe in that sense, a lot of these deals are a lot more like a backroom
deals and there's a lot more private discussions. But in the sense like everything is public.
A lot of the times as you've seen, token holders get to see the kind of terms that we offer
to the DAO, the expectations from us, who we are, how long the liquidity provider deal
is going to last for and what the strike prices are with these deals.
So yeah, it's definitely like a lot more public than the traditional sense. Yeah, which is of course a beautiful thing. There is one pretty significant
downside to doing business in public. Obviously, accountability is increased by doing business in
public. However, you cannot negotiate as good of a deal if you are negotiating in public. And we
have learned that as a Dow Service providers, of course, where it's it's if there's a specific deal
that you could consider to be alpha, as soon as you bring it to the public
forums, it's no longer alpha and then immediately you're you're shooting
yourself in the foot. Okay, 100% the you are you are down in Australia,
correct? Yeah, that's okay. That's what I've noticed is the Australian time zone is one of the most difficult to
to have steady cadence of communication.
What are the Web3 business hours for Callan?
What is the Australian schedule if you work in crypto?
Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a roller coaster, I would say. I think like,
you know, being remote, like a key thing is to kind of really set yourself, like working hours
that you stick to. And so I try to work like a regular, say, nine till six every single day
at home, I guess. And that is kind of like my day to day, but you know, due to the time zone, I'm very often having
calls late at night from probably eight to 10 30pm to speak to Europe and London. And then the US
time zone is not too bad to deal with. But sometimes there's also early morning calls involved,
for example, when I had to do the Arbitrum
Long-Time Incentive Committee, I think I had a few 5.30am calls, which was a bit rough.
So yeah, some days can be like standard, some days can be very long.
And, you know, like as I start to wind down for the day, the team in London begins to
wake up and I start kind of responding to messages there as they as they come through. So yeah, it's a bit up and down
It's a bit all over the place, but I try to have some normality
Throughout the day it never ends. Yeah, I don't know about you guys, but I would I would prefer the midnight
Call a couple times a week then I would get up and take a 530 call. I don't know
I've got nothing to give until
at the earliest probably eight o'clock. It's funny how everybody's internal clock is just a little bit different. It's like I think for me anything after like 7 p.m. my brain's
working, but you know, 5am, 6am, I'm ready to go. So, so Colin, how, I guess, outside
of kind of like work, what other non crypto activities do you do to keep sane in the in
the ecosystem or just outside the ecosystem really?
Yeah, sure. Like, nothing too exciting, to be honest, but you know, I have a dog and a girlfriend
that takes up a lot of my time, as you guys probably know. So that keeps me very busy.
And you know, I'm based in Sydney. So there's a lot of lovely beaches here, a lot of great
food. So you know, the weekends usually revolve around exploring, you know, Sydney's beaches, eating good food and gym, you know,
like hopefully every day if I can get around to it.
There we go. That's the way to do it. Is it a,
what kind of weightlifting or? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Okay. All right. I love it. I gotta say, I, I,
I got to meet Austin in person, not too, not. All right. I love it. I gotta say I I got to meet Austin in person
Not too not too long ago at East Denver and of course I'd have seen a million of the shoulder up
But this dude is huge
He hides it well on the screen I love the gold's gem that's that's my daily thing
That's awesome. There's actually a gold's like five minutes for me. And it's pretty good. I gotta go check it out. It's the real gold. I didn't know that gold was multi hemisphere. I didn't either. That's cool. Okay, Calum, I want to I want to dive in real quick quick to win a mute. So you guys started out as a trading firm
and since you've built this governance arm,
you spoke a little bit on that,
but what was the main impetus to this expansion?
Was this more of an investment?
Was it more of a risk management tool
or was it genuinely a way to shape the ecosystem?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of all of those points you touched on, I would say,
is like ultimately like we're a crypto native trading firm, right?
From the very beginning.
And the decision to go full board and establish a bunch of delegate platforms
largely comes from this crypto native stance and the fact that we
genuinely try to empower decentralization and advance the decentralized world as much as
possible. And that is kind of like our ethos and philosophy, I would say. And having a governance
fits naturally within this, considering how many doubts there are, the natural progression of protocols in terms of decentralization. And then on business side, like having a governance arm,
specifically two years ago as well, plays a really big factor in differentiating
wins-mute from our competitors, because it adds like this quite strong value add for both our
trading arm and our investment arm, which we can offer
to our partners and portfolio companies where we can directly get involved with the tokens
we may hold and help them very early on in their decentralized kind of life.
And one of the clearest examples of this has been our very public involvement in DYDX from
the early stages. We've created 12
plus proposals, created multiple on-chain payloads, we've improved liquidity provider rewards,
we've helped them transition to v4, we helped spin up the operations sub-DAO and we also continue
to sit on their grant sub-DAO for more than two years now. So yeah, having this governance arm really,
one, allows us to take an activist approach, but also really offer our partners and portfolio
companies a good strong value add that is quite important depending on where they are in their
decentralized life cycle. Is there anything that you kind of look for
when you're choosing the DAOs
that you're gonna be working with?
Yeah, I would say like, it's a little bit different now
compared to when we started.
So over two years ago,
when we publicly created our delegate platforms,
like the decision to select certain DAOs
is both strategic and non-strategic.
Strategic in the sense that we had a vested interest as either an investor or token holder.
So it really made sense for us to get involved and use these tokens to actually move the needle
in terms of decentralization and provide feedback where we can and just improve overall governance
efficiency by trying to maintain
100% participation rate on votes.
And then the non-strategic side back in the day was really like, okay, DAOs were still
pretty nascent and there wasn't too many major DAOs.
However, there were protocols that had DAOs, specifically blue chip protocols that kind
of were the key pillars of DeFi at that stage.
And so it really made sense for us to get involved, even though we had a, you know,
a non invested interest in these protocols, but it was purely just to help out on the governance
side and help try and prove decentralization for these protocols. So that was kind of like our decision, I guess, back in the day, it's changed a little
bit now, as you know, we have many delegate platforms and many other DAOs in the ecosystem,
we unfortunately cannot be in all of them. So nowadays, it is mostly strategic in the sense
that we are either like an investor or a token holder. And we are there to help our portfolio
companies really participate in DAOs, improve governance efficiency, provide feedback on We are either like an investor or a token holder and we are there to help our portfolio companies
really participate in DAOs, improve governance efficiency, provide feedback on proposals and
yeah just have a high participation rate in voting. Yeah you guys definitely have done so.
That I've definitely seen from the outside. How would you say that the mandates of Wintermute guide these decisions
and long-term value creation versus, you know, opportunism?
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think like the way we try to think about votes is like pretty
simple and straightforward. Ultimately, if you want these things to progress in a sustainable
and safe manner, specifically to oursALs, the treasuries,
you need to be prioritizing proposals that over the long run add value, right?
And you need to be voting against proposals that in the short run don't add much value,
and in the long run don't add much value and carry very little second-order effect and so a clear example of this is when you have like you know these
ridiculous liquidity mining incentive programs that are kind of just like hey
let's chuck 10 mil at providing incentives to you know liquidity
providers without any consideration of which pool should be selected what are
you know the estimated effects of how much incentives drive TBL and volume.
So yeah, it's really just like proposals that are short-lived, short-term,
carry no strong second-order effects we typically vote against.
And the second kind of philosophy we follow, which kind of backs up our voting decisions,
is to try and take an objective and data-driven approach where possible and as much as possible.
And this allows us to really kind of nail in the long-term kind of vision and also allows us to identify like these short-term kind of ridiculous proposals that add very little value. And by doing it objectively, it's very easy to provide feedback
to, you know, proposal authors
that might not see where we're coming from.
Yeah, it just makes our job a little bit easier
from that perspective.
So I know you guys definitely pride yourselves
in being an active voice,
being an active delegate on a lot of these different platforms.
There is a lot of noise,
and there are a lot of, uh, small fish with great
ideas and big fish with bad ideas.
But how, uh, how do you decide when to step in and when to stay silent?
Is there something you look for?
Yeah, I think like for us, the approach we take is like, we don't want to be.
That person that like comments nonsense
on every single post and proposal that comes into the forum. You know, we're not there
to be like, this is amazing, like, this is great. And let's just regurgitate kind of
what the proposal has stated and be like, yeah, we support it. Ultimately, like the
way we approach it is like when we have a strong belief about something, we will come to the forum and
state that belief or where we see we can actually provide value to the proposal and suggest edits
or changes, we will come into the forum or if there's certain risk things we want to flag in
terms of you know if we think it's going to be a waste of money to do something, or there's a asset being
listed as collateral on like a lending market where there's a couple of red flags that we're
not very happy with, we will raise this. So it really like, yeah, we're definitely in the background
lurking and we will come to the forum when we like truly think we can like actually add value to the
conversation because we don't we don't see kind of the purpose
in just adding more noise to what's already there
and diluting kind of the information
that's already being passed on.
Oh yeah, for sure.
I feel like that really helps validate
your voice as well, right?
When you're posting something or making a comment,
then people are gonna start paying attention
if you're adding value when you do post
and not just a yes man to whatever
the proposal was talking about.
Yeah.
To, oh, go ahead.
I was gonna say, yeah, 100%.
And, you know, like maybe sometimes, you know,
we're not commenting on every forum post,
but a lot of the times we are providing feedback privately, like, um,
through telegram where a lot of, you know,
proposal authors will come seek feedback from us, um, before going to the,
to the forum. And so that's also where we kind of provide some of our opinions.
I think it would real quick on, on that note, I think there'd be,
there's something very valuable that's, there's something very valuable that is kind of
sitting there right in front of us,
which is this idea of a contribution score,
which is something that's,
it's a little bit of like this psychological,
sociological phenomenon where,
let's say you're in a meeting with your team
and someone who never talks raises their hand
and says something very articulate.
And you're like, wow, it's kind of like this credit score
in your mind, it might even be subconscious,
but they just totally went up in the ranks.
Like next time this person raised their hand,
I'm going to listen.
Meanwhile, there's other people that we all know
that are maybe on a group call
when they just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk,
and then you zone out.
And the next time they talk, you're not really going to pay attention to what they're
saying. I think that these delegates, we have all of that data, right? You could basically
index all of the likes and the responses that people, the replies that people made to specific
comments on discourse, the activity of a specific delegate, what percent of the votes that actually, let's
say, winner mute votes yes on these five proposals and no on these five proposals, and what percent
of the time did they actually vote the condition of the outcome of the proposal, all of these
things could contribute algorithmically to the outcome. And I think that would be a really
good way to really have people lean in to increase the
quality of a delegation. Not sure if you guys have ever seen something like that. Just a thought.
Yeah, no, 100%. I definitely agree with that. And I think there actually are some teams that
are working on something similar to this using, you know, LLMs to kind of pass all this data.
something similar to this using, you know, LLMs to kind of pass all this data.
But I will preface it by saying that, like, you know, not not all delegates are
noise in the sense that, you know, they're constantly posting the form, like
there are some really high quality delegates that are very diligent in, you
know, replying to most proposals and actually providing like solid feedback.
And, you know, for proposal authors, you know, sometimes it is nice to, you know,
even if it is quite a few people just saying like, Hey, yeah, we support this, we think it's
great, but don't really provide any like, strong feedback to what they want to see changed.
It's still nice for them to understand from a temp check stage to get to gauge the community's
kind of interest and how they're thinking about it. So yeah, I would say there's a good
balance, you know, and we definitely try to be on the spectrum of like
only really commenting and providing feedback where like we feel necessary.
Yeah, and it's a great way to support those that are posting the proposal and also for the community to kick off that discussion.
Yeah, I think one thing one tool that's been pretty interesting as well for WinterMute is WinterGov.
So Colin, what do we need to know about WinterGov and what do you guys got cooking over there?
Yeah, I mean, so like WinterGov was born from like ultimately, like some things that bugged me about the current space. So like I wrote it on June simply just to make my life easier
because you know there was no like concrete place arguably you can
probably say like Talley's pretty up there now but there was no like place
where you could go to and just like run run kind of like a basic script and
understand you know which proposals are live that you haven't voted for.
Here's a link to them.
Go vote. How many votes have already been made?
What's a quorum like? When's it going to end?
And then also understanding your voting participation for all of these
gals that you kind of work in.
So we have your voting since inception, your participation rate there.
You have your six month inception, your participation rate there, you have your
six month performance for voting participation. And then on top of that,
you can also go see like who has delegated to you and what share of
tokens have they delegated to you. So yeah, WinterGov was like really a tool
to like make my life easier that, you know, we thought we'd like throw into
the public. So I still use it to this day. Every two days, I rerun the
script on June to tell me which proposals are live that I haven't voted for.
It really like helps keep the participation rate quite high.
And yeah, it just keeps me, I guess, on my toes making sure that I'm covering everything that I need to.
So yeah, it's just like a great, very simple tool that we designed for, that would be useful to other delegates.
Yeah, I'm sure that you are able to see some other insights.
Is there anything interesting that you've noticed
from the data as well?
Maybe like inefficiencies or anything that might pop up
on that dude dashboard?
No, nothing specific that stands out.
I'd say the main thing is understanding where delegation comes from for other large delegates
and really by doing that you kind of realise that including ourselves, majority of your
delegation comes from a couple of big actors and that's why you know getting a voice in DOWs is extremely hard because you really need to
find the whales essentially out there otherwise it's extremely hard to get
lots of small delegations from thousands of people and actually like
kind of be heard in a DOW in some cases. We were actually talking about that
earlier is yeah it's like who who are you making decisions for?
Right, because if you have like a state representative
in the US, you're making decisions for the millions
of people that live in your state, but of our delegate,
probably you're right.
It's like one or three whales that have delegated to you
and there's probably a lot of backroom conversation
going on to where you're the proxy decision maker for them.
So that's definitely cool to have that visibility for sure.
Yeah, I would say on that, like luckily,
I would say some of our large like delegators,
we actually don't know and you know,
we don't know who it is and so like,
we don't have this kind of external pressure on us,
which is fantastic. They kind of just let us do our thing. And we're also fortunate to have our
VC arm, which certainly helps in certain situations to at least bootstrap our voting power,
which has been amazing. Yeah, that is nice. So on that note, as governance becomes more professionalized, how do you see the role of individual token holders
versus institutions shaping up?
Yeah, I mean, like ultimately,
I think it's like fair game to be honest.
I know there's been a bit of backlash of like,
institutions holding a crazy amount of, you know,
tokens and being able to kind of strong arm certain proposals. But at the end of the day,
like these institutions have kind of made that investment and they have a vested interest. So I
think it's like fair game, but I do think there is a extent to where it is detrimental to the health
of like a Dow and governance, right?
Because if you have an institution with a crazy amount of voting power that can
pretty much control most votes, it's just like a recipe for voter apathy.
And you're really going to have a Dow that is disinterested because what's the
point at the end of the day?
Like if you put all your, you know, time and hard work and votes towards proposals and on chain, off chain votes.
But like an institution comes along and just goes like, no, sorry.
Don't want this to go through.
Like you're going to feel pretty apathetic and you're not going to want
to participate in this down for much longer.
It's so.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
So I definitely think there's like a limit.
But honestly, I wish more institutions were more publicly involved.
I think it's worse when an institution just votes on chain, blocking proposals or voting for proposals,
but not really providing any rationale or connecting with the forum beforehand to kind of explain, you know, where they're at
and what they're thinking.
Do you see more institutional delegates emerging into the future?
Yes, 100%.
And I think we're kind of already seeing more of that come alive.
We're seeing more VC firms get in the mix.
We're seeing more like companies get in the mix using their treasuries.
So I definitely think that we'll continue to expand.
And I think with the US regulations being a bit more lenient now and a bit more pro crypto,
I definitely think we'll also see more participation from US entities, which is going to be really great.
I just hope that, yeah, they're a bit more public about their involvements and provide a bit more feedback in the forums.
Aside from institutions coming on more, do you see any other major
evolutions coming in governance, whether this is like Uniswap or just DAOs in general?
Yeah, I think ultimately we'll see more service providers fulfilling key functions
to improve decentralization.
We'll see more governance minimization.
We'll see a continued greater influx of like very talented contributors which have already
improved over the past year and a half, which has been amazing.
And then hopefully we will see stronger alignment between delegates and
the success of a protocol.
Okay, do you see any divvied mental models on how service providers
might start working together, different contributors might start working together?
So I feel like that's always a thing in DAOs where it's like,
okay, how can we start working together and collaborating across these different aspects
of the DAO? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have like, I feel like in terms of a mental model,
the current models like are pretty, I think, okay at the moment, because at the end of the day, you kind of just have a service provider agreement with a clear mandate of what is expected and in return what the funding is.
Or you have these working groups which have multiple service providers working together on a clear mandate. I think like the hardest part is making sure there is a clear mandate and making
sure there are deliverables and expectations and then finding the right balance between what a
service provider wants to get paid and what the DAO is willing to pay. And I think this will just
continue over time, right? And I think the next kind of problem that comes with this is like
ensuring that DAOs have sufficient capital to be funding service providers over time.
In an ideal world, what does a fully decentralized, perfectly efficient DAO look like to you?
Yeah, I mean, to me, I would say like explicit alignment between all stakeholders or as much
as possible.
The protocol success is linked to the token.
There's a DAO is self sufficient monetarily.
It's governance minimized and there are clear and simple short term and long term objectives
that get refreshed after they've been achieved.
I think we see some glimpses of this, you know, across some DAOs,
they don't have all these factors,
but like to me, this is kind of like the perfect vision
in my mind.
What's the best that you've ever seen,
most efficient DAO?
I don't know if there is one that clearly hits
all the nails on the head, you know.
I would say like back in the day, and even still now,
Uniswap's governance minimization has been quite delightful compared to some DAOs.
You're really only focused on a couple of key votes, which I think are great. And then on the
other end of the spectrum, you have DAOs that have crazy amounts of programs going on, crazy amounts of
working groups going on. It's a lot of time and effort to stay on top of it. But some other
shout outs to like Lido, I think they provide a very clear vision of what they want to achieve
from their contributors and the DAO and when they want to achieve this. You know, this logic comes from Hasu's Goose Goals and ReGoose,
which I think is like really great. And then I also really like Sky and MakerDow's vision for
the future that Rune posted quite recently, where you kind of have, you know, this Dow earning a
bunch of revenue and programmatically this revenue gets distributed through buckets
revenue and programmatically this revenue gets distributed through buckets over time
to make sure that all their liabilities are covered.
And then in the end, you have this cash that kind of goes back towards buy back and burns,
paying delegates, paying token holders.
And this is all enforced on chain through key parameters and very heavily governance
minimized,
which I think is awesome.
So yeah, there's some DAOs doing much better than others.
There's some DAOs that have some really nice features,
and then there's some DAOs that are pretty chaotic.
And I guess one, going back to Uniswap,
with Uniswap Unleashed just passing,
what are you most excited about in the proposal for what's going to be rolled
out over the next two years?
Yeah, I mean, real quick, just in case anybody's listening and doesn't, doesn't
know what Uniswap Unleashed is, it is $125 million going to the Uniswap
Foundation for various initiatives with Uniswap V4 and
Unichain for the next two years. So pretty cool stuff, pretty exciting. But yeah,
love to hear, Kalim, what you're most excited about.
Yeah. I mean, personally, we're super supportive of it. Like, I think that the Uniswap Foundation this far has done quite a great job based on their
prior budgets and prior objectives.
And they have faced roadblocks and they do face challenges based on US regulations.
So sometimes their hands are tied over very key and important topics and issues that they
really can't push without inviting major legal ramifications
to the DAO, which is completely understandable.
But in terms of Uniswap Unleashed, super, super bullish.
I think Unichain's design is great.
I think Uniswap v4 I'm very bullish on.
I think we transition from a simple AMM to something that is targeted
towards more creators and developers that can like truly express crazy
ideas and crazy pools through V4, which I think like is amazing.
And ultimately, I think that's how Uniswap wins competitively in terms of
in terms of market share and improving their competitive advantage is really creating an
market share and, you know, improving their competitive advantage is really
environment where these hooks and V4 pools can attract as many developers as possible
who have these crazy ideas about different market structures, different potential,
creating different trading environments essentially for markets that might grow in the future and even markets that currently exist now.
And I think, yeah, that's ultimately how Uniswap wins in the future. And the foundation through
Uniswap Unleashed is kind of there to help guide this process. So yeah, super bullish on both
V4, Unichain and the foundation kind of fulfilling their role. Okay, but have to know, what are you most concerned about?
Obviously there's a lot of exciting stuff,
a lot of opportunity here,
but what are you most concerned about
with Uniswap Unleashed?
I think, like ultimately it's a very large budget, right?
And funding is not kind of based on deliverables,
however there are KPI set, but you know,
like funds are essentially released from the get-go. And so there is little protection
mechanisms for the DAO in case certain milestones have kind of broken down or not achieved, which
is definitely one concern. And there are like aspects of this proposal that we did have concerns
about that, you know, we spoke with the foundation about, and they were
very clear and great at describing why they think it's valuable to the ecosystem. We had some
concerns about the $4 million in funding or $3 million in funding to research papers,
and other aspects where we think funding and, sort of like, you know,
funding and budget could be wasted.
But I think like holistically, um, it's somewhat reasonable.
It's well rounded and it focuses on very clear objectives, um,
and key areas that they want to improve. Um, so yeah,
I would say like, you know, we had minor concerns,
but overall, like, we're pretty
happy with the proposal.
When it comes to the proposal, is there a priority between uni v4 or uni chain?
Or do you think they're to be treated equally?
No, I think they're to be treated equally?
No, I think they're very different landscapes and dynamics, right? Like one, you have a chain that is very, like
offers high programmability, offers different market
structures, you're focusing more on the ecosystem as a whole
different apps that are not related to Uniswap. And so the
way you approach that is very different to something like
Uniswap v4, which has like a clear surface area of certain things you can incentivize,
what is actually beneficial to the DAO,
what will ultimately drive more volume, greater market share,
more fees to token holders. So, you know, on one hand, Unichain,
you kind of just want to grow this massive ecosystem with a lot of activity
that drives revenue to the sequence. So therefore, you know,
once the validator network is up, token holders
and then in Uniswap v4, you're really just fighting for market share, ensuring Uniswap
remains like the top dog and captures as much volume as possible.
So in terms of resource allocation, do you think it should be about 50-50 or do you think
that one should be a little bit more heavily weighted?
I think if I had to choose, I would have to think about it more, but my first thoughts
are you probably want to go 60-40 in terms of Uniswap V4 being a larger percentage of
the budget.
And this is simply because you have less of a value leak here and you know that most of
the money spent on Univy for like, assuming there's a fee switch,
will ultimately lead back directly to token holders.
When Unichain, you're kind of,
if you're throwing incentives to launch
for other protocols to launch in your chain, right?
There's only so much value you can recoup from that. And
I know like a percentage of chain activity will also go back to token holders, but I think there's
greater chance of value leaking by incentivizing certain things in Unichain versus just incentivizing
V4. Yeah, and then there's also the argument, I guess, that Unichain itself is more of a
I guess that Uni chain itself is more of a commodity competition, right?
It's a blockchain.
There are lots of blockchains.
There's lots of block space.
However, Uni v4 is arguably a proprietary new use, a novel use case that I think is
now is the time to really pour gas on that fire while
it's lit because we'll always be able to compete with with the other chains and we'll always
be able to compete for valuable block space. But I think we have to strike while the iron
is hot, so to say on before. So I definitely agree. I might even put it more like 7525.
Yeah. Okay. In terms of taking a little bit of a step back, instead of a forward look here on
v4 and Unichain, do you still see it valuable to have v3 deployments and more and more of what's
been going on in the DAO and some of these other previous things, or should we really halt all efforts there and just really focus on the future?
I think it's still valuable and important.
And this is purely because v4 is still in its infancy, right?
And you now have this kind of issue
where you have all these different hooks,
which ultimately just makes it harder for
aggregators and searches to integrate with and drive volume to.
Where V3 is tested infrastructure that's been around for a long time, it's a lot more simple,
it's a lot easier to spin up a router on to trade across various pools.
So I definitely think there's still value in deploying V3,
considering deployment costs are rather low.
You don't necessarily need to have an incentive package
for V3 deployments.
So yeah, I definitely think,
given it's still early stages of V4,
V3 is still valuable and should be deployed
where it makes sense.
On that note, a little double-click into there, especially considering the mandate of Wintermute,
do you believe that liquidity fragmentation is a net positive or negative to the ecosystem
at large?
It's a bit tough.
Ultimately, liquidity fragmentation just caters to different users and traders on chain, right?
It's like if you have a thousand dollars spread over a hundred pools
It's gonna be very hard for large traders institutional traders high net worth individuals to come in and kind of trade against these pools
Because you're just gonna suffer massive slippage at the end of the day, which is not a great trading environments
up a massive slippage at the end of the day, which is not a great trading
environments, um, as opposed to like, yeah, when you have a couple of pools
that have like a really, really strong amount of liquidity, it makes trading
like a lot better in the sense.
Um, so like, yeah, liquidity fragmentation, I do think is like a
valid concern and a valid issue, um, to be honest, but you're ultimately just
catering to the different types of traders on the chain. And, you know, I think like as you know, cross-chain intents get better, solving gets better,
RFQ gets better. Like it does alleviate some of these concerns to an extent.
So now going back to these these v3 deployments, you guys were, Winute, as a delegate, you guys were one of the first to comment
on the most recent co-incentive proposal, which is Saga.
And I think, so you guys were against Uniswap
putting anything towards that deployment.
Is there a place we should draw the line?
Something that's a little bit more of like a qualitative or quantitative line that we could draw in the sand to say if the chain,
if the opportunity has meets these parameters, these criteria, then they do deserve co-incentives
or is it just strictly kind of just a feeling?
Is it subjective?
What do you think?
I think it's a bit of both, right? Like most of these proposals fall into two buckets.
It's either a well-established chain with a lot of TVL, good network activity, great
place for Uniswap to deploy and actually spend incentive. So the decision there is like quite
easy. Then you just decide like how much Uniswap actually wants to invest in this chain. And that will come from you understanding the data,
seeing what competitors are doing on the chain, like DEX competitors,
and truly understanding how much value is actually there to capture for Uniswap.
Then the other bucket is it's a relatively new chain or a chain that hasn't succeeded that much.
In terms of a new chain, the DAO
is ultimately taking a bet on if they deploy incentives here. And usually you kind of just
weigh up, you look at the statistics and you can see that there's really not much activity here.
In most cases, it's actually quite, it's a lot safer to first deploy, deploy V3 there,
see how activity kind of picks up. If activity starts picking up and it's good, then you bring
in the discussions about incentives. Like I don't think a V3 deployment and incentives need to be
done on every single proposal, but there are like edge cases, which is quite subjective. And it's
like, there could be a brand new chain, right? That has an absolutely exceptional team, which is quite subjective. And it's like, there could be a brand new chain, right,
that has an absolutely exceptional team, which has been proven over, you know, a decent amount
of time, they have a lot of capital behind them, a lot of great investors, their tech is great,
they have a vision of how they plan to bootstrap DeFi and DeFi activity. Then, in this case,
it might make sense to consider deploying incentives
there despite maybe a very, very high lack of activity.
And this is ultimately just the DAO betting on Uniswap taking a good portion of the market
share and assuming the chain is going to be successful.
So yeah, it varies, but it's definitely a lot easier when you have an established chain that comes to the doubtful funding.
One perspective that I have heard that's, I would say, not contrarian, but more adjacent
to what you're saying is, is that these specific chains that are very novel, the opportunity
is that Uniswap can basically position itself as the flagship
decks on this chain, whether or not the chain itself, it's a home run and
becomes a billion dollar chain.
It's more of having Uniswap everywhere, like the seven 11 of the world, right?
It's, it is the convenience store that everybody thinks about.
And if we start to go really, really risk off,
then on some of these smaller ones,
people are gonna come in and eat the brand's lunch, so to say.
And then if we start to consolidate
and really only ever launch on the best of the best,
then it'll be a little bit more of a competitive landscape.
So I think that is is the only the only potential strongman that I've ever heard
for that perspective, but I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I definitely see where you're up.
I definitely agree that
there's one way to objectively retain value and that is wait and see. Wait and see how the organic traffic builds up.
So definitely appreciate that.
And I think that's like a very like fair perspective and, you know, and sometimes
we do think about that, but like, you know, I think it's also like, there's
other considerations, right?
Like more often than not, Uniswap carries a very strong brand with, you know, true
interest tried and tested code that has never had an exploit,
right? And so naturally, if you launch that on a chain, there's some value premium attached to
this and LPs are probably going to be more inclined to provide liquidity in Uniswap v3 or v2,
knowing this versus maybe a new protocol that has been a fork with changes and like less audits and token incentives.
Definitely. There's something to be said there.
Um, okay. In regard to protocol owned liquidity,
one of the hot topics next to the few switch.
Do you think that unit swap should build its own liquidity using
P O L?
100%. I think it's a fantastic idea. This is something I'm
very pro for and something I would like to see but I don't know I'm undecided
on the mechanism as which this happens. Ultimately I wish it came from a
byproduct of the fee switch which has built up over time. I think it is like
probably one of the best things Unitwap can do with fees and potentially
their treasury. Because at the end of the day, right, Uniswap's market share increases
are proportional or somewhat proportional to the TBR that these pools have, as you can
provide thicker liquidity, it provides better quotes, more people want to trade against
your pool, more fees, more volume, right?
And on the other hand, like on top of this,
you have protocol on liquidity that is now like non-elastic
in the sense that it's not going to disappear
without a Dow vote or a working group kind of managing this.
So you don't have to rely on exogenous liquidity
or exogenous liquidity providers to kind of stay in these pools for a long time. As soon as
they leave, like there's going to be material drop in your TVL and the pool
is going to become less competitive. So I think it's like, yeah, one of the
best use cases if there is excess capital within the Dow to begin bootstrapping
protocol and liquidity, especially for v4. I think v4 is like even more fun,
right? Because then you can begin to help out
very cool, interesting V4 hooks
that might drive a lot of market share to the protocol.
And on top of that, you then begin to earn fees
and continue to grow the treasury.
So I think it's a fantastic kind of idea
and something that I would love to see implemented.
And you touched on the fee switch a little bit.
I wanted to double click there.
What do you think the rollout strategy might look like for the fee switch?
You talked about like V4 and how that can ride on top of that with a fee switch,
but would love to hear your input there.
Yeah, look, I, we don't have a strong opinion on this. Like we are not the experts when it comes to this.
I'd rather leave it to like, you know, the gauntlets of the world that
already kind of deal with this stuff.
Um, or other, you know, risk service providers that can model this stuff out.
Um, and I think there's like always going to be a trade off, right?
Like LPs lose in this situation, but then maybe stakeholders and token holders and delegates
win.
So there's like this clear trade off.
I think also like when you compare it to Uniswap Labs, this front end, right?
They're just adding an extra fee on top of this kind of trading fee.
So it doesn't actually affect liquidity providers,
but it affects end users and traders on the platform.
But ultimately these traders are kind of unaware of this
to an extent, or they don't mind paying higher fees
because they just enjoy using the Uniswap UI wallets.
So there's definitely like different trade-offs,
but yeah, I mean, in terms of like
actual rollout, I don't have a strong opinion here. Like at the end of the day, TVL is likely going
to go down, you're going to lose some people, there's going to definitely be a level of attrition.
But like it's probably worth it if it means there's a lot more like alignment between token
holders, stakeholders and delegates with the protocol. Yeah, do you have a take on like the balance
between like the consumers, LPs and the DAO and how to maintain that? Because you don't want to go too heavy on one side or the other to lose too many folks and lose too much market share.
Just love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think it's, it's tough, because you actually don't really know what's going to happen
until you kind of put it into practice. And I mean, if you look at competitors, right, there's a lot
of competing Dex's that have fee switches enabled, and there's already LPs not earning, you know,
the same amount of money as they would be earning in Uniswap. But like, maybe there are token
sensors, which kind of compensate for this. In terms of like, yeah, Uniswap, I think it's difficult.
Like people are going to lose.
You don't really know how much you can charge in terms of fees to LPs and traders.
But I think that's where V4 is like super interesting because you can experiment with this.
You can have, you know, volatility, kind of aware fees,
where maybe the dollar takes a bit more of a cut when there's a lot of volatility and people are willing to pay
more and you put it on the traders instead of maybe the LPs, which I think is like very
interesting. And there's yeah, there's a crazy design space with V4 that I think can be very
cool and interesting to see.
I'm glad you touched on that. That was actually going to be something that I think can be very cool and interesting to see. I'm glad you touched on that.
That was actually gonna be something
that I jumped in here and asked
is that in standard economic models,
typically the tax is passed down to the consumer,
not the supplier, right?
So in the same, if we're talking about liquidity
as a commodity, you would think that the same thing
should ring true.
And so if there's a fee at the
protocol level that returns to the Dow, even if it's just a couple of bits or more, whatever,
we'll see. And that can always increase slowly. But then in these B4 experiments that we could run,
you could try the same exact ETH USDC pool, one of which the liquidity providers are earning the standard
amount and then in the other one, the liquidity providers are earning less. And then, you
know, in the first one, the actual fees would be coming from the consumers themselves, which
are the traders. And it would be interesting to see the net economic benefit of the two
models. So that is definitely one use case of V4 that's going to be really neat.
Yeah, 100%.
And I think it's a bit harder than traditional models in the real world where you compare
it to consumers and suppliers because I think one of the hard parts about this is you have
these DEX aggregators and these solvers, which will ultimately root to the most efficient
pool depending on gas slippage and fees, right? So like,
even if you decide to put the burden on the consumer and not the supplier, you could,
it could be more harmful to the overall volume of your pool versus like just making, you know,
LPs kind of cop the fee in the end or cop a reduction in the fee in the end.
So yeah, that's definitely like, I think aggregators definitely play a large role in
volume and something the Dow needs to consider. And one thing too is, look, I can't speak for
everybody, but I can definitely speak for myself and say that any, hypothetically speaking, any transaction that I've ever done on chain
has been basically rooted in FUD or FOMO.
And in neither one of those cases,
do I care whatsoever how much it costs
to execute the transaction, right?
And so unless you're a professional trader
that is doing this for a living,
I don't know that the average consumer is going to be dissuaded
by any of these trivial fee switches. But all that to say, I'm excited to see what happens for sure.
100%. Yeah, looking forward to it.
Kalan, looking into the future here as Uniswap evolves, we have some very exciting things on
the horizon. What do you think Uniswap governance needs?
What are the holes in the game?
I don't know. I think it's in a decent place at the moment.
I'd say like, honestly, like the main thing
like I personally think should exist is way better alignment between paid delegates, delegates in general, and token holders and
the success of the protocol, which is like, obviously, you know, this is a topic of discussion
that's been going on forever.
And it's something that honestly has probably been hurting the doubt to some extent and
causing some apathy to some extent.
So I think, you know, if there's a way in which, you know, the DAO can eventually become self-sufficient monetarily in terms of fees,
use these fees to kind of go towards protocol and liquidity, build up like a stable treasury,
and then use excess fees from this to then once again,
you know, begin rewarding these token holders, these stakeholders, these delegates.
I think Uniswap will become a lot stronger once these things are in place.
But I think like, you know, overall, right now, it's in a pretty decent place in terms
of, you know, it's highly governance minimized.
You have a couple of core working groups
that are handling some key functions
that are valuable to the DAO with any issues.
And you have like somewhat of a delegate incentive program
that currently runs, even though I have some views on that,
but I think it's in a decent spot.
All right, Kalan, wanted to ask one question.
So let's say you were delegated 41 million Uni tokens,
and you had total control over the treasury.
What would you do?
I don't know if I would control the treasury.
I'd probably just control the fee switch, to be honest.
Look, like, UniSwap has a massive treasury. It honestly like has a very large runway. I'd much prefer to see a treasury grow through
a fee switch than have to sell off a bunch of Uniswap tokens on the open market. That's
kind of like where I sit, to be honest. Like, yeah, I think it's a lot healthier, much better for the Dow if, you know, we begin
building like yield bearing stablecoins, maybe some alt assets, maybe some protocol and liquidity
and some funding for delegates and token holders through a fee switch than selling off of uni.
Yeah, definitely patent the balance sheet and helping out the treasury to be able to
do more.
Give us give us some alpha before we wrap here.
What's what's an underhyped project that you're excited about?
Oh, I don't know.
Like, I guess personally, you know, OIL finance has been in a tear recently.
The TVL has increased a crazy amount, you know,
I'm interested to kind of see how they end up standing up towards the likes of RV and Morpho and
seeing like how, how long this growth is like sustained. Um, but I think the team have like
done a great job at, I guess, coming back from what would have been a very tough time and,
you know, relaunching OILA and attracting TBL with the token that is like pretty much fully divested.
So yeah, I think like keen to see how they go.
Where can people best follow your work, Calum?
Oh, probably on Twitter and Winter mute socials, I write a weekly governance digest that is
posted both on Twitter and towards our institutional counterparties, I would say, which covers kind
of major proposals for the week. It's not a lot of proposals, but it covers like, I would
say, you know, the proposals that are very important to certain DOWs
and the votes for these DOWs as well.
And so they're just key summary and highlights.
Very quickly, very quick to read, has a graph about certain stats.
So if you want to get your dose of, I guess, governance,
head over to Twitter and you can find the stuff there.
But other than that, yeah, just follow Wintermute socials.
You can follow me on Twitter. I don't post too often. But yeah, that's that's where most of the alpha
comes from from outside.
Okay, beautiful. Well, Colin really, really appreciate it.
That that's gonna wrap up another episode of the
ungovernable podcast. Count. Thanks for all your
perspectives here. This was a really fun conversation. For
listeners, we, please don't forget to subscribe on Spotify and YouTube.
We drop a new episode every week and follow us on X at Grow Uniswap to stay up to date.
That was the Ungovernable Podcast.
We are Joe and Austin from Alpha Grow.
See everybody next week.
Thanks, Calum.
See you guys.
Thank you guys.
This was the Ungovernable Podcast by Alpha Grow. Watch all our episodes on YouTube or Spotify or weekly live on X. Thank you guys.
