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Ungovernable Podcast Ep. 17 – Billy Gao
Recorded: May 14, 2025 Duration: 1:05:35Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Join the ungovernables.
No filters, no apologies.
This season we're cracking open Uniswap governance.
Welcome to a new episode of the Ungovernable Podcast.
Hey everybody, welcome to a new episode of the Ungovernable Podcast.
Today we are joined with Billy Gao gow the bp of stanford
blockchain club billy is shaping how tomorrow's protocols will govern grow and scale not just
another blockchain enthusiast he is a multi-disciplinary thinker reimagining how we
collaborate govern and create value in the digital age we are joe and austin of alpha growth your
premier defy operations and growth firm. Billy, thanks for
being here. What else should our listeners know about you? Thank you very much for the invitation
and it's an honor to be here. No, I think that's a very comprehensive introduction and glad to
get kickstarted today. So from mechanical engineering to computational linguistics you've uh you've obviously got a head
on your shoulders um what was your very first interaction with the blockchain um it was quite
a while ago to be honest so that was before i came to stanford so originally i was uh I was based in Hong Kong, I grew up there, and I did a lot of math, as most nerds do, back in high school.
And my main focus was basically poking around and seeing what's interesting to me.
And back in high school, I stumbled upon mathematics mathematics modeling which is basically trying to use
equations and variables to answer things in real life and one of the questions that i was curious
about would be stocks or like uh crypto like coin performances and that was something that got me
intrigued especially during the last bull run and outside of that i also did research on cryptography so back in high school
we had to do this kind of like a thesis statement thing for to graduate and for my high school
research i basically did my paper on elliptic curves so that was a great kick start and kind
of from that point onwards i got into the crypto crypto scene, joined Venture Capital in Hong Kong
that was researching basically crypto back in the day.
And that kind of got me kick-started
and it was a fun journey since.
Say again what your thesis was on.
Did you say elliptic curves?
exactly yeah will you give the uh the tldr on what that is um it's basically the encryption
Exactly, yep.
Will you give the TLDR on what that is?
like one of the parts of encryption so um my kind of motivation back then was basically how bitcoin
uses elliptic curves so um even nowadays in like discrete logs, you have elliptic curve discrete
log, which is one way to, it's part of like a lot of, it's basically part of, since discrete
log is hard to solve and elliptic curve discrete log is kind of an easy way to do things on that part it's like
a trapdoor function that that makes things easier and it it's basically an a hash function in that
sort okay gotcha well i don't want to bore anybody with that stuff that's above me
uh but okay so let's see how did you how did I don't know if fun would be the word most people would use for that stuff, but I'll give it to you.
How did you jump into DAO governance?
Oh, again, I guess the theme here is pure poking around and see what's interesting. Stanford joined Stanford blockchain and learned a lot more about basically what the club is working on.
And when I joined the club, I got a wide exposure to a lot of interesting stuff.
And one of the very interesting stuff was DAO governance.
Or like we have our own governance team.
We are delegated on UNISWAL.
We work with other protocols and dows as well
so i thought hey that's interesting um let's have a poke at it and that basically became
what i did for the first stint when i was in the club okay that's what you are
i'm sorry oh i was gonna say um i feel like for student organizations, there's a lot more than just like governance and voting, right?
What else do you do at the blockchain club?
At our club, we actually have a lot of different branches.
So for instance, we have our research branch.
We have our own magazine, Stanford Blockchain Review, where we publish articles written by students.
It could be technical, like it could be economic incentives, things.
It could be like, for instance, about stablecoins.
It could be legal related.
We have all sorts of stuff on that end.
We work together with the School of Engineering, Law School, Business School on a lot of research stuff.
Outside that, we also have our own engineering slash project endeavors.
So some of those we work with different protocols.
For instance, Optimism, we work with them on some research slash engineering stuff.
Outside that, we have an accelerator slash accelerator investment branch which we work together with
and we also have governance of course and all sorts of different stuff and within the club we
also have a huge variety of competition with people interested in different things uh really
firing all cylinders and in which do you kind of line up with? I saw you're also a co-editor for the articles that were being written.
Yeah, I did that for a stint.
Again, like at our club, it's a very decentralized process.
And it's like you get to get in touch with a lot of different things.
And personally, I think i took a stab at most
things and seen what's interesting and yeah that was my thing back then so do you i guess another
question about this how do you feel like your perspective has evolved since you started in the
decentralized governance space till now uh you know being able to see all these
different pieces whether it's like research editing articles this could be
like the grants I believe you're part of that as well so how kind of has your
perspective evolved since you first started in decentralized governance centralized governance? Great question. I think I like most people coming into crypto, you start off with a very naive kind of way,
I would even say, like you have this overly, I don't know, theoretical or academic type
of concept coming in, at least that was me.
And afterwards, knowing, like learning a lot more about the scene, being completely immersed
in crypto Twitter, you get kind of a whole different view and you realise what a lot
of thing is going on.
And you see a lot of, I say changes and developments even through the past
two years a lot of the things when so for instance when I first entered the the scene there was a lot
about like NFTs and stuff and that's totally gone like you see things come and go but at the same
time you also hear certain narratives or certain concepts that continues to
be there and some innovations that hasn't really changed throughout time as well what about from
the pantera lens i know that's uh not so much in the dgen nft space but as about as far from that
as we could get very very you'd be surprised you'd be surprised
but like there's also some like very interesting conversations on on that end as well and we're
open to quite a lot of stuff but on that end it's more from an investment perspective and we're one
of the largest uh crypto investment firms out there in early stage projects and it's it's been really fun
working together with them and yeah that's basically on that end on so okay on the
pantera is one of the the biggest names in in venture in this space and and in my opinion the purpose of venture capital is really to um to accelerate the salt
the solution of a problem in a specific vertical right so what have you seen well first of all
what has been there in your mind what is what is pantera's thesis um there's a lot of different so
Um, there's a lot of different, so crypto is a huge theme.
There's a lot of different subsectors and we have kind of thesis in different, like
within different areas, we have different thesis, but in general, it's, as you say,
it's accelerating the development of blockchain and we're looking for projects that are both like technically sound
like with the right team with the right product as well as basically pushing
forward the pushing forward the industry as a general and I think that's the main
difference in a way from a student blockchain club and from a venture
capital firm from the perspective of a venture capital firm you have
a more holistic broad view of the entire industry and you kind of what you do is kind of a nudge
around and try to push things forward in some ways and back the right projects in that kind of way
are there any specific problems that you still see in the crypto space that are begging for solutions that
you guys are actively seeking or is it more of just a an inbound approach where you guys will
look at everything and and if it sounds like it's a good good fit for something then you'll then
you'll pursue it um i think i'll flip the question in in another way as in what i like so personally i think there's loads of
problems within the crypto industry as we would all see and know there isn't much like
uh your question was basically like what problems do we see my answer is basically there's all sorts
of problems and there's like all areas we would see problems.
So it's not necessarily like an inbound approach.
We have loads of thesis around different areas.
We have technical ones.
We have more economic ones.
And I think that is kind of reflective, reflected on the way we invest as well.
What would be the number one problem
that you would say exists right now still in the space?
I know there's a lot of them, but is there,
if you had to just put your finger on one of them?
There's loads of different issues around the space.
I think within the team as well, we all have different kind of focuses.
Personally, I can just say like the type of things that personally I'm more interested in.
And that would probably be the more technical ones.
And that's where I spend more of my time.
So for instance, you have your cryptography, your privacy, your security as a narrative.
And that's something I think would continue to grow as a subsector within
crypto and that's something I'm personally interested in as well.
Uh, yeah, I feel like there's a lot in that space too, especially with, uh,
privacy, um, especially with more and more institutions come on chain, uh,
being able to, you know, not have everything out in public,
but still be able to do the things that you want to do
and leverage blockchain technology in the way that it's capable of doing.
Yeah, on the lens of institutional,
there's always a lot of talk on RWA and stables.
And I think from a project kind of point that there's a
lot of people working within that area and that's all of course like extremely interesting and
a safe ish bet in general yeah that's for sure what do you think about like uh dark pools do
you get a touch on that at all with Pantera?
It's not my like focus.
Like I do mostly like investment early stage stuff and less of the liquidity and that kind of things.
But that's why I would say like you would be surprised about like Dejan stuff on that end.
Well, it sounds like it's a lot of fun.
Well, I guess outside of like Web3, reading proposals, analyzing different projects, what do you do to stay sane?
Great question.
I'm so forwarding to the idea.
I don't know, like nerd stuff in general, I guess.
Like, I'm a student overall, so you have to go to classes go do lectures like uh go to go to
lectures do homework that kind of stuff but like outside that i like sports i like watching a lot
of sports as well i play basketball table tennis and all sorts of things along those lines and for
in my free time i i find myself playing online chess quite a lot but that's just me hey
there you go what's your what's your chess rating oh i don't have an official one actually which is
yeah it's i've like again it's something i've it's a hobby of mine that i've like
self-learned self-played like it's it's fun and i i do that quite a bit yeah i feel like chess is a great way to
kind of soothe the mind a little bit but still be a little active yeah yeah so i want to get
touched back on um like the stanford blockchain club i know that you're a delegate um a part of
many different protocols and working with multiple organizations
outside of those DAO protocols.
How do you reconcile the ideals of decentralization
and the ideals of decentralized governance
with the actual real-world friction
where it's hard to keep up and get things done
in the fast-paced nature of DeFi?
Okay.
A lot of very interesting things to talk about on that end.
And it's a, it's a huge rabbit hole to dig into.
So, um, we're concerned.
So we acknowledge that we are a student blockchain club and like that
comes with its benefits and disadvantages.
And we acknowledge that that is the situation.
So first of all, we are being delegated.
We are a delegate.
And a lot of the people that delegate to us are centralized in a way,
ways for instance large capital funds and what we are trying to do is kind of using our own lens
for instance, large capital funds.
view expertise in a way to contribute towards that governance and to give our views our perspective
on on that and to try and make things more decentralized or to offer our own resources or to try and push things forward in
that end. So for that what I mean is for instance like contributing our own opinions, our own voices
at times and at the same time we recognize the resources that come with a university
blockchain club. For instance we get access to top top tier talent being be it student developers be
it researchers phds professors that's something that we are good at and we have a really academic
view on that point and we're really good at research i'm sure i don't have to elaborate on
that point so that's something we can push towards for instance in making things more decentralized in
general yeah so you'd say almost like that research component academic component you can add that
flavor and perspective where other folks might not be able to uh see that from the the get-go
yeah definitely and another thing as well like so we recognize a lot of people within the industry, especially within governance, are like professional delegates.
And that's basically why, how things work and why people are willing to do doubt governance in a lot of ways.
of ways and a lot of these people have been in the scene for a long time and they have
a certain view on what things are doing they might have different narratives or they fall into
different blocks but they are experienced in some ways and from the perspective of a university
blockchain club what we always bring is a sense of optimism or a sense of naivety that things could be
better or what we have we offer our own views on on that point and that's really why i think
having university blockchain clubs is super important despite there's people like uh of
course like being against the concept of universities within
DAO governance, and I totally see their point. But on the other hand, I would say that we offer
a unique perspective with our own unique lens, with our own unique resources that is really
irreplaceable in some ways within DA that governance. I would definitely agree.
I think we've heard, of course,
some of the very based opinions from people that are like,
yeah, this billion-dollar treasury is controlled
by a bunch of college kids.
And I think there's a fine line, right?
If every single delegate were a student blockchain organization,
then that might be cause for concern.
But in most cases cases that's not the
case there's all kinds of different delegates with different perspectives um so in regular politics
i'll use the us as the uh the golden child example but you know some people say like oh the us is
democracy it's it's not a democracy if it were that we'd have a very different situation here. But it's kind of similar, actually, to the way that a DAO works,
where, yes, if you have one token and you vote on a UNISWAL proposal,
it doesn't matter, right?
Like, yes, it has the elements of democracy,
but it also doesn't actually matter if you just have one token.
What really matters is what the delegates decide.
And that's kind of how it transfers over to the representative republic that the United States of America is with their voting.
So, okay, I'll land the plane. What I'm trying to know here is, do you think that DAOs and delegates
should listen to what the community says and then vote accordingly? Or do you think that the point of having
delegates and professional delegates
is so that they take their expertise
and they bring their expertise
to the front lines of decision making?
Of course, it's a bit of both.
Like that's...
that that what's the how do you weigh those two together um
How do you weigh those two together?
okay um this might be a a like a step back uh and then i'll again i'll use the approach i'll
land the plane in a bit so um we have been looking at different governance mechanisms
at different governance mechanisms and one thing that is consensus basically is that within any
type of governance system what you're trying to do is to maximize the social optimality or like
social utility you want to be representative of what people think and make the best decision or
for the doubt for the organization or whatever context we're putting
it in, it might be like real life politics or anything, you want to make the best decision
for the community. And the problem with sometimes having everyone chime in and having everyone's voice listened is that sometimes the necessary
expertise on a decision or a necessary context information might not be fully captured for
an entire crowd. So for instance within DAO governance there's some perhaps extremely
I don't know technical concepts that your everyday day-to-day
protocol, like someone with a uni token might not understand, or there might be some economics
incentives where my everyday uni holder would not have time to read into. And at that time,
you would need a delegate who is willing to spend more time, read more information, form their own opinion and have their expertise to basically vote and make decisions in that way.
And I do think a huge part of our governance research is how can we make this
process more, quote unquote, democratized?
So for instance, as a UNI token holder, you can better pick the delegate that would
fit your views the best so that your views would be represented and you are trying to
make the best decision for the entire DAO and
even one step further it's another trend within governance that we have been looking at is
potentially having AI agents being a representation of your views such that we have more customized
agents to vote on your behalf and making the best decision for the entire community
to vote on your behalf and making the best decision for the entire community.
So then if you've got an entire community that believes, well, okay, I'll take one more step
back and I appreciate you going into such detail with that, but I think there's a lot of assumptions
that have to be made at a certain point. And one of those, one of those is the, you mentioned is to
just serve the DAO and to serve the community. And, and you kind of, you kind of alluded to
the fact that that's dependent on what you are optimizing for. And so in, we'll take Uniswap as
an example. When we serve the DAO, serve the Uniswap, if you're a delegate at Uniswap,
you're trying to make decisions that will serve, that will best serve the DAO, serve the Uniswap. If you're a delegate at Uniswap, you're trying to make decisions that will best serve the DAO.
Is that the token holders?
Is that the sustainability of the DAO's treasury?
Is that the protocol itself?
How would you, for Uniswap as a specific example, what does it mean to serve the DAO?
For us, it would be the protocol itself.
And by extension, token holders.
So in a totally ideal world, although this is definitely not the case,
a better protocol would lead to better...
The token holders would benefit if the protocol is being improved.
And that's what we're trying to do and in a way again that's one of the uniqueness of a university blockchain club we don't
really have a lot of vested interest or like financial interests on our own and we're not
trying to maximize our bags we're not trying to pump anything in that end so we can be less quote-unquote evil on that
end as well and i i hate to just i'm not being contrarian for contrarian's sake but i will argue
that the uniswap protocol and serving the token holders i feel like those two things are are
uncorrelated i know there's a lot of speculation that happens with a governance token and whether or not the protocol is performing, but functionally speaking, those two are completely independent of
one another. The Uniswap token does not have to exist for the Uniswap protocol to be the ubiquitous
liquidity layer of the internet, right? Technically speaking, if labs were to just, you know, do their
thing forever and keep crushing it with branding and i think it
could still be a huge thing without the token itself being a part of it yeah that's a totally
valid point and and i agree to what what you're saying but like that's basically what we are
trying to maximize for like in general what we're trying to do is to make a positive
contribution on the industry and like from the day-to-day decisions that we are making what we
believe is that we're trying to make the protocol better and from that point onwards we'll make the
token holders better like that's basically reflected in all the decisions that we make
and in some ways like like taking a step back it's impossible like we would
not be trying to push one down for the other like we will not try to sacrifice token holders for the
protocols or vice versa like totally like bin off the protocol for token holders like that's
really not what we what we want to do as Ideally, you want to see both go up, right?
Both ships rise with the tides.
It doesn't necessarily have to pertain to Uniswap, but just all of your
experience with governance. Has there ever been a time that's very memorable for you where
the entire active community was very for or against
something, yet you guys went ahead and
just laid down the hammer and you're like no we've got to do the opposite of what the community wants
because we think that uh this is best for you um i think there's a lot of contentious slash interesting discussions where there has been both sides to it.
And in a lot of cases, we have stood our own ground and argued what we stand for and what we think is best.
like two examples would be in the wormhole layer zero case back in the days and Unichained like
earlier the late last year-ish like two of the instances that we were quite opinionated on
on certain points of view and we stood by it. Yeah yeah so one thing, Billy, I wanted to dive in on that you had mentioned previously that I thought was super interesting was like LLMs or AI essentially being leveraged in DAO governance.
as somebody being essentially something
that somebody can set up that will vote for them
based on their preferences.
But how else do you think that LLMs could be used
or even misused in DAO voting?
Oh, yeah.
Misuse is a very common idea that we look at.
Let's be honest.
Nowadays, on forums, you can see a lot of things are ai written and that that
is the case um like some delegates would use ai's for the assistance be it for to draft up proposals
or to make their responses it is the case like we're seeing it and and it is it is what it is
on that end um but on ai agents it's an ongoing research and it's something that we are
super interested uh in and we are doing research with lots of different parties on that end uh
last week the week before last week we also held like samford's blockchain governance summit at our
law school and we had extensive discussions on the goals on future developments and one of the topics that
came up recursively was of course uh ai agents what we think is that with agents it kind of one
makes things more convenient and what we hope is that this could increase participation of course
participation is a huge problem within governance people don't tend to vote
sometimes uh especially your like layman token holders and what we're trying to do is make that
process easier and to kind of shift where you can pay it like shift where you pay attention to
and i can answer that as well but basically we're like, there's,
there's a lot of ongoing research on that area.
So how would it improve participation?
Is this going to be like the AI voting for the delegates or is this
the AI essentially weeding out all the noise to focus on key topics that
they're interested in?
There's lots of ways that we're
looking at so for instance a more primal or like a more easier the more like first step achievable
process is to have some kind of delegate chooser so for instance if you go on, I don't know, like Taliagora for Geniswap,
like you see a huge page of different delegates.
And if you were just a uni token holder, first of all, you might not even get to that point.
But even if you get to that point, you would be five-sided by, okay, who should I choose?
Like, which delegate should I delegate to?
Should I just randomly pick one of those?
If we were to have a basic,
even for instance, take the AI out of the question, have a questionnaire and then you can
fill in all your preferences and then it would fit the best, like the delegate that might fit
your interests best, that might be a first step and that could make things much easier so more people would be involved within governance but
if we were to bring in more things uh i don't know like it could be used as uh for instance
a summarizer it could tell you okay based on your based on uh based on the previous voting history
of this particular delegate like this where they stand on the general spectrum this is
where you stand on the general spectrum uh this proposal is about sort of sort and sort and
explained in more simpler words or if it's for instance if it's technical you can have it explained
to you in simpler terms or if it's like 15 pages long it can have you it can have a tldr version of it there's a lot of things that
might come with it it's a lot of like like in progress stuff basically what are you most excited
about billy um in an ideal world we hope that there could be ai agents to help you make the decision-making process easier.
But of course, we recognize that there's bottlenecks and there are concerns. So for instance,
it's basically if you have an AI agent vote for you, that might go haywire. Like, what is the
decision made on? do you actually agree with
that like there might be a lot of ways that you could hack that system as well so yeah it's it's
something that's really exciting some new stuff on on that end but at the same time would you
recognize that it's still a work in progress yeah no i think there's a lot a lot of exciting stuff
especially with ai um i wanted to touch on like the futurearchy
as like some emerging alternatives to to governance and voting especially putting
kind of your money where your mouth is um what's your perspective on different governance experience
like futurearchy uh-huh um i think it's a very interesting experiment.
And that's kind of what the space is good for.
Like within blockchain governments, we can quickly reiterate on different, quickly
to raise on different process.
And Futurarchy is one of the interesting mechanisms that we are seeing.
And there's a lot of sides to it.
So first of all, it works in certain settings so prediction
markets in general it works where there is a general like basically there are assumptions
or like underlying properties that have to fit in order for future key to work in a governance
setting and decision-making setting.
One of them is that people know what they're trying to do.
And the second thing is it's easy to settle or there is a way of settling it.
And these are some theoretical things that might not fit a lot of protocols.
And outside Futarchy, we also have, for instance, sortition, that's something being
discussed, and also a lot of technical or social mechanisms that might be involved. So, for instance,
we have cryptographic methods to make voting more private and secure. We also have social incentives for instance if we use reputation there's also uh
talks about proof of personhood those kind of things involved in governance involved in voting
these are very lots of different narratives and directions that we are looking into basically
what do you think oh go ahead joe just real real quick on that note, of all of these different innovations, all the way back to essentially an AI LLM layer on top of the forums that would actually help facilitate decision making, all the way to some of these other concepts and experiments that you're talking about.
Whose responsibility is this to implement these? Is agora and tally is it discourse or is this are these third-party apps
that are going to be built on top of these these platforms that already exist and already own the
distribution what do you know what do you mean by that so So we have been seeing like different, I mean, I guess it's third parties or like companies basically with their own. So for instance, within FUTACI, there's there's quite a lot of people doing a lot of innovation within that. And we're seeing people trying to implement it this way uh for a lot of like i don't think the foundations are doing it basically that that's
that's for one and if daos want to implement that although i think it's still some way off from
these things being like in in daos that might be another option if that's what we're talking about
so for instance the i'll go back to the specific example that,
that really resonated was when you mentioned how a lot of delegates use AI
for, and you can just, like you said, you can just tell,
you read it and you're like, no, this isn't human. Um,
it's just like a little bit too formulaic and structured for it to be a real,
real personable and real opinion of someone and
so for instance you remember on in school you had to use turnitin.com and then it would tell you what
percentage what percentage of this was plagiarized i think it would be it would be pretty interesting
if a specific a specific governance community could turn on via Tally or Agora discourse, whatever,
wherever the forums exist. If you could turn on something that would automatically flag a comment
or a proposal for, you know, this had 92% of this was just AI generated. And then it would,
of course, it would incentivize people to be more human and more involved in what was going on.
So, for instance, something like that would be, I think it would necessitate that that would exist directly on top of the forums.
Because these, you know, discourse, for instance, has the distribution.
has the distribution instead you don't want people to have to go somewhere else
to to engage and make it a little bit more difficult as it is there's already
discourse and snapshot and tally for the uniswap right and so i think that the more that we can
bundle all of that up into one product i think the better and it's probably about time that we have
dennison back on the podcast to talk through what tally is doing uh and how they're how they're innovating because i they do have an
incredible product for sure yeah i wasn't sure if i should mention that but if you mentioned it yeah
that's what's that's something they're doing as well and yeah oh it is it is awesome so what what
would you say touching back on uniswap
you're you're obviously involved in a lot of different dows you've seen a lot of different
governance um you've seen a lot of execution in governance and in function and dysfunction
potentially what distinguishes uni swap from other dows that you've seen? It's the OG kind of...
Okay, so a few things.
First of all, at Stanford Blockchain, Uniswap is kind of our main DAO that we focus on from the club side.
So that's, of course, something that distincts Uniswap from others, from our perspective, but at the same time within the industry, it's kind of, as I said, the original swap, and it's basically what started it all, and it's very important in that end.
And yeah, that's how we see that.
yeah that's how we see that yeah i mean i feel like with the long-standing tenure
it's it's hard to focus on anything else um for for uniswap i guess what are you most excited
about billy in terms of uniswap for like long-term growth um i think chain is a great invent innovation
in in that way capturing your own value back on, like basically instead of leaking it.
And I think a lot of developments are in the right direction technically.
And these are all quite exciting in their own ways.
Now, why do you feel Unichain over v4?
It's, v4 is kind of like a sustainable innovation, sustainable increase on top of
things but Unichain might have the potential to like being able to capture your own value and we're trying to see how much it can go
to and level of like it i i'm i'm actually really excited and really curious to see how things could
go on that end and to what extent could it possibly set a trend or like it's it's a new space for for innovation and it's come
it's new in its own ways yeah there's definitely a lot going on especially with like the super chain
um and really being a liquidity layer there to open up other opportunities uh on the super chain
i guess billy what what are some of the like eon chain indicators that you
feel like are important for uni chain to hit like aside from tbl uh i think we discussed this in in
like when we had had our first call and what like i really care about is like activity and uh so basically daily swaps daily usage fees revenues
that kind of stuff and that's really what i care about and that's how you indicate that it's
active people are using it it's a good product and people are coming back
yeah yeah and it's organic it's gonna stay after
incentives end right yep so speaking speaking of that so there a couple days ago when when i checked
on on merkle for instance there were i think 420 000 of uni incentives being distributed
$420,000 of uni incentives being distributed daily, that was daily rewards. So 400 grand in
daily uni being sent out. I think today it's about half that. First question is, do you agree
with that as a means for growth? A few things. Back when the proposal came out, there was a huge discussion, we
were involved in a lot of them, we had our own opinions in different ways, and the low
hanging fruit is basically, as a delegate, a lot of times what we do is basically rebut
or question decisions, and the low hanging fruit is basically rebut or question decisions and the low-hanging fruit is
basically whether this is effective or not. Like, where are we spending all this money to?
Why are we doing this? Why are we not putting it to better use? And of course, that is a question
that we should ask and that is of course the first approach. Whether or not this is effective, what are we looking for in returns, what's the key
benchmark that we're looking for.
But on the other hand, another thing from my personal perspective is that where else
are we spending the treasury or what's the purpose of the treasury if we are not
moving it and it's just staying there we have to put it to use and so for instance you can have a
huge treasury but a dead protocol and that is not what we want to see and what we want to see in the
ideal scenario is the funds being put into good use. But if we cannot have optimal use of funding,
what's the step we would rather take?
Would we rather not spend the treasury and do nothing?
Or would we rather have a more ineffective spend usage
of the treasury for some kind of effects?
And that is definitely fair.
Is there other strategies that you would say
that we're missing out on in experiments
that we're not necessarily running
for Unichain and B4 growth at the moment?
I think, again, this is completely coming
from a university blockchain club point of view, and this is something I've mentioned to the Foundation as well.
I think there is a lot that can be done in the younger dev slash eco community.
So what the general ecosystem needs, like this is something that the foundation
has mentioned as well as well as in general, you need devs, you need people interested
in it, you need people talking about it. Maybe not entirely from the foundation on
base of my own words as well, but that's what you want ideally. And I think from a university
point, a blockchain club point of view, we see that there are a lot of these talents roaming around that can be captured.
So for instance, there's talented developers, there's aspiring founders at Stanford, and is there any way that, or are there any things that we can do to capture them for instance I don't know like
events staff grants to make them aware of this is something a good opportunity they could build on
there's definitely more that could be done on this perspective and I really think that
university blockchain clubs or university students should be something that a lot more
or university students should be something that a lot more, be it DAOs, be it protocols, should focus on because there are talents that are equivalent, like they might be less experienced compared to existing devs, but they could be unwrapped super quickly and they are super malleable as devs. That's for one.
And for two, it's a great way to have a new sense,
a new, a unique perspective in a lot of ways.
They contribute new ideas and more practically,
it's way cheaper and you can get good ideas,
people working on stuff for a fraction of the cost
of what I think most people are doing now.
Yeah, and I feel like it's a great pipeline as well,
as Uniswap becomes less and less of like a DEX
and more of like key infrastructure,
whether that's like before or Unichain,
having those folks launching protocols,
launching projects,
you're just gonna gain more and more traction
as more and more folks and more and more builders
come onto your, let's say the app store of DeFi essentially.
So that way they're building killer apps
and have reasons for other folks to get onto the Uniswap platform.
Definitely. for other folks to get onto your onto the to the uniswap platform definitely like one thing i want to touch on billy was the uni chain aspect so i know there's been a lot of focus on like the decks
for uni swap and growing tbl there what do you think the next like or the low-hanging fruit is
next like or the low-hanging fruit is for Unichain to get to that next level of growth
um UVN it's something that can be improved in general how it code from from our perspective
of course how it coordinates with the DAOs how decision making like the processes can be made
how decision making like the processes can be made there's things to be smoothed out and of course
there are also like technical decisions or ecosystem things that to be honest from our
perspective we don't we we are not that involved like it's not our decision to make but there's of
course stuff that could be done there as well
yeah maybe quick could you give like the tldr on the the uvn so the listeners know what we're talking
about oh um i don't think off the top of my head i could i could give it a good
i i don't think i can give a good like explanation but it's basically a
validation validation nodes and there is their own system i've read on the paper from for a while ago
yeah no no worries no worries um and maybe we want to touch on a little bit about uni v4. Yeah.
Have you seen from whether it's just your Stanford hat or your Pantera hat,
have you seen any v4 hook use cases that are very exciting or maybe anything
that Pantera is invested in around v4 hooks?
I don't think so.
Nothing.
I'm not too sure.
From my perspective, that was, again, not my focus of projects.
So, yeah, I'm not too sure.
I'll be supposed to be honest.
No, that's all right.
So, personally, though, have you seen any V4 hooks that you're excited about?
I think there's been talks on a lot of like, uh, DeFi projects building on top of it.
I wouldn't really pinpoint to anything and from our perspective or at for from the perspective of standard
blockchain again it's not really our like it's not really our decision to make or like involved in
our process in that way but we are seeing innovation for instance from the dallas perspective
we are seeing uh for instance a few days ago there was the RV proposal, those are the things that we are paying more attention to on that end.
So then maybe one thing that a little higher level that might make sense considering you represent both Uniswap and Pantera, how would you feel about a fund, a Uniswap ecosystem fund that would accelerate and incubate early v4 hook builders
and make sure that agreement the crop from for instance right now there's no way for a there's
no specific uniswap v4 hook fund and one thing that we've heard a lot of from these from different
builders is they're essentially building a v4 hook is not just adding a couple lines of code. It's you're you're basically
building a new DeFi protocol from scratch. And so they're running into this cold start problem.
And so each individual hook needs liquidity bootstrapping, they need marketing, they need
a full team to essentially build and grow these different protocols.
And so one of the things that we're exploring on the Uniswap growth side, working with the
Treasury Working Group and the UAC and some other folks is potentially once there's a
DUNA set up and the legal ramifications are all all out of the way we're exploring this idea of a
uniswap ecosystem fund that would be investing in a high upside projects that have that are
promising with with strong teams so is that something that uh that you guys have ever
thought about is that anything that pantera has ever explored doing like an ecosystem fund style style with one of its portfolio companies? Um, okay.
So a few things, I guess.
So it depends on like an ecosystem fund would, it depends on where, where the funding is coming from.
And I guess from what you are trying to infer is from like venture capitals for
them to bootstrap a fund of that tool
or it could be both open-ended yeah open-ended question it could be it could be uniswap dow
that invests it could be some of uniswap's venture partners that put together the fund
it's super early conversation here so would love to to just get your unabridged opinions about something like a V4 innovation fund.
Yeah. So the parallel that I would draw to is within Arbitrum, there's a gaming fund for their own ecosystem and that kind of thing and it's more from auction itself instead of from venture capital since from
venture capital it's you basically you want a breadth of different projects and you want
to like it makes sense for you to kind of invest in different things instead of put
all of your investments within one ecosystem so that's on that side and is it something that so i think it's
more of an incentive incentive dev grant scheme that the foundation or the dow could uh could
muster up that would make more sense it in short that's that's that's that's my thoughts and that is yeah probably more of what will materialize
is something from the uh the doubt self and i think the other the main thing there is that is
that they the dao retains exposure and upside to the success of the projects that it incubates right
if yeah for instance in off chain they have they have a similar project uh they have a similar
program where you basically try to invest in early stage teams early stage projects and it's
kind of their own stuff in on on that end and yeah i don't see why like from uh from a foundation
from a from a protocol side it makes sense but from a venture side it would probably be more difficult in practice
not so much yeah no i i think i think you're right i know that the wormhole ecosystem fund
it's called borderless and it's it is uh similar to what i was alluding to
um where it's it's a essentially a venture fund that exists inside of the wormhole ecosystem
as a whole.
But again, still early conversations.
I think there's a lot that can be done
once all the ducks are in a row there.
Billy, what are some of the experiments
that you believe Uniswap is not running?
They should be crazy.
No wrong answers here.
Bad idea party.
It's like some of the craziest ideas you've had
that you wish you could take to the forums and and make happen um okay uh one thing that it's less crazy is is on the
dev side and that's something i've mentioned like uh integrating student devs and that kind of early
early stage early career early talent pipeline i think that should that's a low-hanging fruit
that should be done um but a more rich thing again this is something
i've discussed with some parties as well is to have kind of a dow manager or like uh in so okay
back back um a lot of delegates um it's okay. One, it's easy to criticize. It's difficult to execute. Two, it's difficult to execute in general because you're a delegate. So one step that could be made is to have someone that, and three, of course, a lot of these delegates, they have conflict of interest.
one that and three of course a lot of these delegates they have conflict of interest um way
more than standard blockchain because we at most work for we are our main thing is unisop we work
with other protocols but not to the level that they do where there might be inter like a lot of
times a lot of protocols are doing similar things and being a delegate on different protocols means that there is conflict in different ways and what i'm possibly suggesting is to hire out a firm
it might be an existing delegate it might be someone extremely experienced within the space
and have them solely focus on down management management, be it proposal, be it ecosystem,
be it coordinating things, governance mechanisms,
all sorts, and have someone to be,
someone to live and think about Uniswap,
someone who can focus on figuring ways
to make it a better place
instead of multitasking different dows and
delegating and working on their delegations like uh when they're like it's like instead of being
just one small fraction of what they do it's the whole thing that they do about it's almost like
hiring a president right someone that can be held accountable.
Not necessarily president, but I would say for a secretary,
that would probably be a better way.
Someone to help you do things, organize things around,
make things, instead of, like nowadays,
you kind of have a lot of, you have a lot of part-time secretaries
or like a lot of people that are involved but are delegates.
But instead you kind of want someone to be like outside the foundation
which has a thin governance team to actually have someone who can work on the data
and focus on data.
Yeah, just almost somebody held accountable
and kind of moving things forward.
Yeah, kind of.
Okay, so Billy, one more question for Uniswap.
If you had total control of the treasury,
41 million uni delegated to you,
for the Uniswap DAO treasury, what would you do?
What's the first thing you do?
Buy the labs.
Buy what?
Buy labs?
Or some sort of...
Again, that's a stretch,
but it's an interesting idea I've had for a bit or like partial ownership or some sorts of that again that's that's a stretch but it's it's an interesting idea i've
had for for a bit or like partial ownership or or some sort of things such that there is better
incentive so like great connection immediately yeah that's that goes back to something we
discussed like equity versus token versus tokens like which one from so from a foundation from a form of labs
from a doubt perspective you're looking at different things and as a delegate we are kind
of focusing on trying to make the down the protocol a better place and that's something
we discussed earlier that's like a stretch slash slash an interesting thing that might that
it's it's an interesting stretch yeah yeah i like it
that's first time we've heard that what's what's the other answers that you guys got
these switch these switches number one definitely okay yeah i i really do like i'm you know you've
got me thinking billy hold on a second i wonder what would be the value like what is market
valuation of union 12 labs i'm actually i don't think we can we can buy them there's no way but like
they have good people they have good devs like you labs have good devs then like if we could
coach them but but yeah it's interesting that'd be such a unique that would be such a unique mna situation that would
go down i think in history if this magic internet money purchased the company that created the
protocol that's managed by the magic internet money i think that would be that'd be such a
cool thing i like it I like it a lot.
Billy, thank you.
Thank you for your time here.
Where can everybody keep track of your work and your opinions?
Twitter, that's probably the easiest way.
It's, yeah, basically what's currently rolling on screen, perfect timing.
Stanford Blockchain as well.
That's what we're hosting a lot of events we're doing a lot of stuff and we welcome a lot of people to work with us and going into the next year i'll be leaving the club so if there's
anything that's also a like a way to communicate and reach out love it all right well that is a
wrap of another episode billy thank you for your insights. For our listeners, do not forget to subscribe to Spotify and YouTube, drop in new episodes each
week. Follow us on X at Grow Uniswap to stay up to date. That was the Ungovernable Podcast.
We are Joe and Austin. See everybody next week. Thanks again, Billy.
This was the Ungovernable Podcast by Alpha Growth. to you.
