On The Brink with Castle Island - Devin Walsh on Operating the Uniswap Foundation (EP.470)

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Devin Walsh, executive director of the Uniswap Foundation joins the show. In this episode: Proposing and setting up the Uniswap Foundation The Foundation's priorities and role in growing the Uniswap ecosystem Uniswap v4 hooks as a new primitive for developers to unlock efficient innovation Supporting developers and researchers on Uniswap via grants Fostering education and participation in governance  

Welcome to another episode of On the Brink. In this episode, we talked to Devin Walsh, the executive director of Uniswap Foundation. We talk about the process of spinning up the foundation and garnering support, the role they play in the Unoswap ecosystem, Uniswap V4, and the Hooks Primitive, and a lot more. So here's my conversation with Devin. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect. like the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast.

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This is Ria from Castle Island. And today I am joined by Devin Walsh, who is the executive director of Uniswap Foundation. Very excited to have Devin on. She's been a longtime friend in the industry, one of my first friends in crypto. So it's exciting to be able to record an episode with her and pick her brain on all things Uniswap Foundation. Welcome, Devin. Thank you, Ria. It's very exciting to be here. To start, maybe tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to, I guess, initially Uniswap Labs and then eventually Uniswap Foundation. So like you, I've been in the space for several years now since around 2016, and I have worn many different hats across the ecosystem. So my journey starts when I was in grad school at MIT, where I got the opportunity to do independent research with some of the early researchers in the space at the digital currency initiative there. I then spent some time at consensus in its early days, 2017, 2018, working in product and strategy, spent some time investing in the space in VC, then held a number of leadership roles across

startups and was a freelancer in the space for some time while I was kind of figuring out my next move before I was hired to become chief of staff at Uniswop Labs. So there got the opportunity to work on a number of really interesting things, acquisition of Jeannie, as well as working on some other product launches. But I also got the opportunity to act as a liaison to builders in the ecosystem, as well as for governance participants, so proposers, delegates, et cetera. And I saw a lot of really interesting things happening there. For instance, I saw the early success of the Unisop Grants Program. I think one example I'd like to call out is in early research grant that they gave to Dr. Guillaume Lambert resulted in him actually raising venture capital,

like a few rounds of venture capital, to found a company on top of Unislaw based on that research. But I saw an opportunity to do much more for the ecosystem as well as governance. With governance, there was also just kind of a need for additional support, coordination, tooling, etc. That didn't quite make sense for a company like Uniswop Labs to focus on, but could make sense. sense for a foundation like entity, which we had seen pop up over the past few years. So really, the recognition of that opportunity to kind of 10 to 100X was happening in the ecosystem and in governance led to me with my co-founder, Ken Ng, leaving labs, spending some time talking to

delegates and other builders in the ecosystem about how we could support them, and then launching the foundation. That's great. That's a really helpful overview. Can you talk about what was the opportunity for Unoswap Foundation? I think I saw an opportunity for the foundation to begin to, well, one, just build more connectivity through governance. So not only between proposers and delegates, but also amongst delegates. So something we've started to do recently is recognizing the fact that on-chain governance is extremely minimized for the perspective of Uniswop and recognizing the fact that the amount of talent and energy of delegates, like far outweighs that. We've brought together delegates to begin to understand what else they can do outside of

purely on-chain governance lens. So coordination, really like building the rails for more communication amongst those stakeholders to help and support more good things to happen. And I think the last thing I'll throw in that I think is quite important is providing the support like educational materials and sometimes additional analysis, which are public goodsy across proposals. And I think to basically support delegates and being able to do their jobs well and make educated decisions. So I think a good example of that is a report on cross-chain bridges, which we provided funding for earlier this year. This kind of came from some friction which arose in governance when it came to discerting which bridge to use to send governance messages to another chain. Analyzing the security of a bridge

is a difficult task, even for the most talented smart contract engineer, particularly when it comes to a niche use case like governance and arbitrary message passing. So we commissioned a report to do a security analysis, kind of specified to the governance use case for really not only Unisot, but the space to use. And just anecdotally, I've heard a lot of support from delegates, a lot of delegates who have reviewed the port, but also throughout the space, I've definitely heard from other protocols who have referenced the report as a way to get some additional diligence prior to choosing a bridge for their projects, since this is kind of a common concern. So it's quite a lot of information, but those are some ways I think about governance and how we help. Yeah, absolutely.

So correct me from wrong, but the foundation was created a little over a year ago. Is that right? Yep. You talked a little bit anecdotally about feedback that you've received from delegates on some of the work that you've done to improve delegate education and just help them make more educated decisions. Apart from that, how have you seen the existence of Uniswap Foundation just improving the governance process when it comes to the Uniswap ecosystem? Maybe just touching on governance first was really kind of a vacuum in anything regarding governance before. we came on and just to highlight a few things that we've done, I think in addition to that bridge report, which is, I think, not only a very incredibly useful totem for Uniswap ecosystem and governance generally, we're also continuing to work on the development of a message

passing aggregator, like a multi-sig of bridges, which is one of a first few of its kind. Nosis is working on another model. I think there are a few other models out there, but this for use cases like governance bridging, which, you know, require, which don't really care about latency, prefer security is, I think, something that not only will be able to use, but others as well. So I think that is huge. We also launched Uniswap Agora and through kind of a marketing campaign to launch Uniswap Agora, which is a delegate-focused portal, onboarded more than 60 new Uniswap delegates. Many of which I'm happy to say have continued to be very actively involved in the

governance process. Many of them have came to one of our first IRL events. We'll come to our subsequent ones. Some of them who are really digging deep and becoming bigger protocol contributors are may receive grants. We're discussing a potential security focused grant with one of them. And I think when it comes to governance, those are some things I'm quite proud of. Zooming out and thinking about what have we done to support the broader ecosystem because I think growth, the growth and sustainability of the uniswap ecosystem at large is also really where we focus a lot of our efforts and will continue to double down when V4 launches. Over the last year, one of our largest grants went to GFX Labs, which launched not only OkU Trade, which is one of the biggest

alternative swapping interfaces with a focus on a pro-trader user to the Uniswop interface. And I think that is important, one, to show the diversity of kinds of interfaces and applications that can exist on top of the liquidity protocol. It also kind of introduces competition in interfaces in a way that we're seeing people talk about literally today on Twitter with labs introduction of fees, of fees at the interface level, I think represents, you know, not only competition to some of the interfaces that folks know well, but in addition to, you know, that fee aspect, we've also seen, Oku be the go-to interface for cross-chain deployments of Uniswop. And I think that has created a lot of value for them. And I've been talking for a bit. So I'll kind of like pause there and maybe just

also say Uniswap becomes a developer platform. And that is going to be our focus for the next year. And I think there's just going to be a lot for us to do and to create value for for everyone when it comes to before. I think that there's many threads that I can pull on from that. Maybe just taking a step back, you talk about the function of the foundation in being the steward for growth of the uniswap ecosystem. How do you think about the ecosystem? Like, who would you define as the uniswap ecosystem and how, I guess it would be helpful to understand how you balance your duty to the ecosystem combined with your relationship with labs and maybe other stakeholders. When I think of what is the Uniswop ecosystem and when you kind of look at,

okay, who are the people who are actually using and existing on top of the Uniswop protocol? Because a lot of people's minds, you know, just go to Uniswap Labs. You actually have, without even digging into kind of like specific kinds of words yet, many different archetypes. You have developers. You have developers, then like data analysts, folks who are kind of trying to understand what is actually happening on protocol and leveraging, you know, for folks who are trying to understand what's actually happening across DFI. You have liquidity. You obviously have liquidity

providers and swappers. You also have token issuers. So either orgs which you have to issue tokens, and stable coins, etc. Social clubs, communities, Dow's, which have issue tokens, which require liquidity, which create liquidity pools, delegates, proposers, etc. And then within, each of those, there's kind of a broad spectrum of kinds of each of these archetypes. So particularly within the developer archetype have everyone from the newbie hacker. We've onboarded more than, I think, 150 developers into the ecosystem just in like less than a year. There are close to that also building hooks already prior to before going live through to some of the projects which have already been building on Unisop like Aracus, Gamma,

liquidity management tools, all the way up through we view aggregators and routers as also being folks who exist within our ecosystem. How do we kind of weigh all of these actors and how think about our work? So when I think about long-term growth and sustainability of the protocol and how we, as an organization that gets a lot of our work done via grants to fund public goods, as well as our team coordinating and organizing within the community. I laid this out in our most recent proposal, but we're really focused on what I view as the highest leverage inputs to long-term growth and sustainability. So the three areas that we're focused on over the next year are developers, researchers, researchers and academics. And then

more as like a high-level topic, value creation, capture, and distribution, amongst all stakeholders. And I think those three, if any developer has the tools that they need to not only take some innovation or some idea that they have to build a hook or an entirely new hook-focused application on uniswap, and not only do that, but like build a business, I don't know, raise VC funding, maybe get started via a grant and, you know, generate revenue just directly from their users. That is great for uniswap. And then that's, net new organic order flow or liquidity provided to the protocol, which is adding to the flywheel. Researchers are key in that there are so many smart, motivated people out there focused on

solving and iterating upon some of the biggest questions, some of which are kind of existential to defy and crypto generally related to MEV and LVR related to LP returns. And we want those folks focused on, you know, innovating and solving those problems, focused on Uniswap to focus the improvements to user experience, Swap or NLP experience on Unisop. And again, like another hot topic, stakeholders, we have heard from governance that, you know, having value created via protocol, some portion of that fairly distributed to stakeholders is something that governance cares a lot about and that we view as being long-term important to the sustainable growth of the protocol. So those are kind of the three areas that we're focused on amidst all of the ecosystem participants.

You mentioned UNISWOP before a few times, and I think generally a lot of people kind of understand the paradigm shift that it is going to represent, but I think for listeners of the podcast that may not have learned about it too deeply yet, it would be helpful if you can summarize Uniswap V4, the concept of hooks, and maybe core insights that you observed you being Uniswap that led to the design of V4. Looking back at the trajectory of Uniswap, from V2 to B3, the name of the game was capital efficiency, so improving capital efficiency. This one kind of vector that existed within uniswop for both swappers and LPs. From V3 to V4, rather than increasing some vector that already

existed within the protocol, it's more of a paradigm shift. And the key focus, I think, for us, amongst all of the changes that are coming with V4 is this concept, this new and kind of primitive inherent in the protocol of hooks. So a hook is some arbitrary code that can be inserted into a liquidity pool upon its creation. So today, when you create a liquidity pool, you set a fee tier, you set, you know, the two tokens that will bootstrap the liquidity pool. That's about it. In the future with V4, you will also be able to insert a hook that will run, can run at various points in the life cycle of a pool before or after a swap, before or after someone provides liquidity, before or after a fee is paid.

And I think that, from what we've seen, that kind of blows open what is possible on Uniswap in a way that we think is very exciting and value-creative to protocol. So some examples to, I guess, paint a picture and a few, and I guess like how the foundation thinks about how we can support Uniswap before is both supporting developers and hackers and learning how to experiment with this new primitive, think through how. how they can build a project, potentially, you know, build a business on top of V4, but also leverage or grant funding to fund both the development of and R&D into hooks that we think should exist as public goods for the ecosystem. So a few areas that we've identified and are already kind of working towards our hooks that improve LP profitability or that mitigate LP risk. So we've already seen across hackathons a lot of people experimenting,

with hooks that kind of manage liquidity, rebalance liquidity on an LP's behalf based upon, you know, preferences that that LP may have that lend out liquidity to lending protocols like AVE or compound when it's out of range. We've also seen the development of, you know, at a recent hackathon hook, a hook that looked into the history of a given swapper to understand if they had been a victim of significant MEV in the past and gave them a subsidy based on that. So I think those are some kind of like interesting areas that we're excited about. It also introduces the ability to experiment with curves, the kind of curbs that just prices alongside markets.

So someone could introduce a curve that's like V2 style, different kind of curves for stable coins, for instance. So I think that is also pretty exciting, opens up the ability for a development. to who in the past might have forked Uniswop and then had to develop, build their innovation, but then have to bootstrap liquidity on their own, be able to focus purely on the innovation they want to see live, but then benefit from the fact that Uniswap already has liquidity they can take advantage of. And lastly, I'll just say another focus of us will be funding teams to help build the infrastructure to see this ecosystem thrive. outside of, you know, the hackathons and the hook templates. So like hook list standards, for instance,

like hook best practices, identifying security concerns that come with hooks, finding auditors who can assist earliest hook developers and, you know, making sure that their hooks are safe. Building hook explorers and registries, we already have one live at unispophocks.com for folks to check out everything that folks are building. So there's a lot there that I think is quite exciting. And I think it's a very exciting, primitive, and it just seems, I've mentioned this a few times, but this idea of being able to build on the liquidity within the Unoswop ecosystem, really, and create a primitive that makes it really easy for people to tap into that. I feel like really does justice and takes advantage of the composability enabled by crypto, which is very unique to this industry. You've mentioned a few

times, obviously, improving governance has been a reason for the existence of the foundation, but another key component is this idea of funding grants and improving the grant funding process. I would love for you to dig into that and tell us more about how you have structured the grants process to date. Sure. So looking at the evolution of UNISWAP grants, I think kind of paints a picture to where we're going and where we think we can add the most value. So looking at the Uniswap Grants Program in its earliest days when it was 10, a few contributors and a multi-sig. The grants program,

how it would work is folks who were working on interesting things would submit an application for grants funding. The team would review it against, you know, a variety of characteristics. They, you know, looked for in grants and dispersed funding based on that. As we have grown a team and really built our subject matter expertise across some of those core contributors I mentioned in terms of research, what are the areas most requiring funding, how do we access some of the top researchers in the space? Developers, what are the developer tooling that are really lacking in the ecosystem? Like, we've really taken an opportunity to learn a lot from the ecosystem, digest what are the gaps that exist, and then more proactively scope out grants via RFPs that define for

ecosystem and people who want to contribute. Here are the things that the ecosystem needs. Here are the things that builders need, LPs need, that we think the protocol needs when it comes to research that are more, I guess, like, proactive, like going from more passively receiving applications to more proactively scoping out what's required, in our opinion, and based on our expertise, and then receiving applications from dozens of folks, evaluating them across a number of quality standards, interviewing the teams, and then ultimately deciding who will receive the grant. That's been a big shift over the last year. As we think about the next year, so with the increase in funding that we feel very lucky to be receiving from Uniswop governance,

we are increasing the size and scope of how we think about these RFPs. So thinking, shifting our view on funding, maybe a, a kind of one-off three to six-month series of posts and deep dives into L-Ping to more programs, to sustainable efforts that are repeatable over time and not only last a long time, but kind of are set up in order to have whoever has gone through the program or received the grant, setting them up to stay within the ecosystem for the long term. And I think a good example of a program that we've set up that exemplifies that model is the TLDR fellowship. So TLDR stands for the latest in DFI research.

It is a first of its kind, DFI fellowship and conference that we have been working on and will actually formally announce very soon that leverages the insights of a number of council members who are all, you know, very reputable folks across the space from flashbots, etc., to, to define from their perspectives, what are the areas that need more research and focus from the space? The Unisot Foundation works with them to kind of set up a fellowship program, basically put out the request for fellows, request for research, identify a number of fellows, set them up, and basically support them for a number of months. And then for some of the fellows, we may think through, okay, how do we turn this into a proof of concept on Uniswap? And so this is something that's repeatable will result in a conference in 2024 in New York. And I think really like elevates the size and scope of the kinds of grants that Uniswap is able to make and ultimately impact as well.

As you were thinking about redesigning or augmenting the grants process, is there anything that you drew inspiration from either within the crypto space or outside the space? We reviewed the kinds of programs and processes across a number of grant-making organizations and, like, open-source foundations that support long-term funding for the development of their software. Also, you know, just took learnings from our own process and looking at the last year and finding that the most successful in our opinion grants and the ones that have had the greatest impact thus far, and we believe we'll have the greatest impact are the ones that were larger, dispersal. of grants funding and took more effort from our team to set up and maintain and support, but ultimately will be more positive for the kind of impacts that we're trying to make. So you mentioned, and we definitely have to talk about it, you, the vote is not done yet, but I think it will be done by the time that this podcast goes live, but you just, I think maybe

a couple weeks ago put forth a proposal to get incremental funding for Uniswap Foundation. and you had a year ago a similar proposal to get the initial tranche of funding for the foundation. Talk a little bit about the process of putting forth a proposal, doing education, rallying votes, rallying people to actually vote on this, and your decision to divide it up into two tranches over a certain time period. Yeah. So I think there are a few things to kind of touch on there. I think, one, how do you put a proposal like this together?

So after I left Uniswop Labs, me and my co-founder Ken spent two to three months really just talking to tons of delegates in the space, builders in the space. People have been in the space for months to years, you know, about how they kind of understood this gap, the existence of this gap, and what they believed was needed for the ecosystem. And, you know, all of that feedback went into our initial proposal. Another question, I guess, is, I guess, breaking funding. into disbursements. And I think there are two things to touch on there. So one is just kind of calling out there, there are a lot of foundations in the space, but each of their models, both what they focus on, you know, what the team is made up of, their mandate, where their funding comes

from differs and kind of goes across the spectrum. And what we've seen is that many foundations are launched at the time of a token launch. And there are a multitude of reasons for this. These foundations are also typically a core kind of founding team will often like split into two and have some folks with foundations, some folks stay kind of like the labs entity. And that is not how the Uniswap Foundation came to be. I think I wasn't around at the time the UniToken was launched in September 2020. But at that time, protocols didn't really have foundations. It wasn't really a thing. Like there was no model to look to. So I think that's potentially one of the inputs into why There was no foundation back then, but reflecting on our model and I actually think how we work today is a good thing.

The fact that the foundation does not have any founding team members from labs really only has me who was at labs for five months. Like otherwise, like no ex-labs employees is a very good thing. I think in order for an ecosystem and protocol to be sustainable for the long term and truly, I guess, quote unquote, decentralized, not reply it reliant upon a core team. Like, it must be able to survive and have teams which are not from the core team. And I think having a foundation grow without core team members being part of it, but also be funded directly from uni token holders, from uni delegates. Having that kind of check on ourselves, that isn't necessarily built into other foundations funding models, I think is ultimately a good thing.

It introduces other kinds of tradeoffs, like going through the governance process is an interesting thing. But I think ultimately it means that we're set up to prove and show that it's possible for, like, teams outside of core founding teams to be successful. And also ensures that if governance decides that we have strayed from our mission are no longer acting in a way that supports the ecosystem and protocol, you know, they can choose to vote against funding us ultimately. Yeah. No, I'm really happy you got into that because that was going to be one of my questions is I think I read somewhere actually that Uniswap Foundation was, is the first or is one of the first to have actually gone through a formal governance process to facilitate its creation. And yeah, I think today, to your point, most of the foundations that I've seen have been this function of the core team splitting into two groups at the time. or even sometimes before a token is launched and then kind of going from there. Beyond sharing the proposal on the governance forum and obviously on socials, can you talk a little bit more about what you and Ken did to spread the word, explain the proposal, shed light on the proposal, and rally support from the community? Sure. So both times around the process has been

somewhat similar. There is the talking to people within the ecosystem, which first time around it was me and Ken, just spending three months, literally like seven, eight hours a day, just calls with tons of people throughout Uniswop and Defi more generally to now having a year's worth of information and feedback across, you know, we have a governance lead, we have a developer relations lead, we have a growth lead, we have folks focused on each stakeholder within the ecosystem to gather feedback from and hear what they need. So we have the benefit of that information. We also, you know, for this time around, had a lot of conversations with delegates, with

other folks we really respect the opinion of who are really in it for the long haul in terms of growing un-swap to hear their thoughts on how the foundation should evolve over the next year. So it's not anything special. It's really just a lot of conversations, learning a lot from folks, as well as, you know, taking our learnings at the foundation, what we have seen work faster for the last year and plotting our path forward for how we think we can make the most positive impact on the space. You mentioned some of the team that you've brought around the table. And I think in talking to you've been very intentional about building out this team.

as you kind of set out to build the members of Uniswap Foundation and grow the team, what kinds of skill sets and experience did you want to bring around the table? And yeah, talk a little bit about the team. The team at the foundation is wonderful. It's one of the things I'm proudest of building over the last year. And I think the common thread across the team is both the smartest, most hardworking folks within the space, but they also are all very excited by and passionate about this idea of building this ecosystem on top of Uniswap, which can mean both empowering developers to,

you know, not only like build, half, build cool stuff, like build a business for themselves. Our biggest success cases, the things I like to focus on the most are the GFX labs, the panoptics, the teams which, you know, started with a grant, come from grants, but then gone on to build really successful businesses that highlight different use cases, different kinds of applications that can be built on top of Unisop protocol. Same with, you know, researchers and innovators in the space. I think all of us are, understands the importance for Unisot, but also DFi as a whole in thinking through how to take MEV research and actually turn it into like a real world. Actually like apply some of the learnings and research

into tools that can actually benefit users. And I think our ability, we're somewhat like uniquely enabled, given we're a nonprofit, we have grants to take on some of that work. And I think everyone on the team is really like excited by that unique opportunity. As you've built out the foundation, it's been such a public process. You're literally building in public. How has that felt for you? What have been some of the benefits and maybe challenges of building in public? That's a great question. I guess it truly is a novel process and a very novel model. And I would say, maybe I guess I'll focus on like the opportunities and the positives. We are able to get a lot of feedback from a lot of different people. If someone has an opinion like on the internet, you will hear it, particularly

I think if it's in a governance forum. So we hear from a lot of people. We hear from a lot of different perspectives, all of which will respect and take into account and, you know, provide a response to even if it's one we don't agree with. And maybe abstracting away from the foundation, like to more general decentralized governance learnings. I think some of the challenge that it challenges that I've seen others face when putting forth protocols are a kind of like a VC team, a VC startup relationship. I think that kind of relationship, you have like a ton of context, you have buy-in, that is inherent in that relationship due to the investment that's been made. And I think when you have any team, which is looking to build a long-term relationship with

governance, with any kind of like decentralized organization, that kind of context and like buy-in and kind of respect for the things taking time to evolve, particularly when we're talking on the timelines of product development and finding product market fit can be lost sometimes. And I think that's fine. I think, you know, we, like at the foundation, we're signed up for this. I think we have a lot to do and we want to be kind of held accountable to deliver to governance. But I think for teams which maybe have less funding or support, it definitely like serves to be a

challenge. On top of when things spread to Twitter and things go viral in the forums, like that's just another thing that will turn people away from working with DAWs and governance generally, which maybe is fine. but for folks who want this model to succeed, that's like, that's something that I think a lot of folks are also working on, but it's something that we've seen. Yeah. And just a clarification question, you, the foundation ultimately decides who to give grants to, right? So like the foundation is the organization to which the ecosystem kind of delegates the responsibility of providing grants. Is that right?

Yep. I also really like this comparison of like a VC and a startup that they fund versus a foundation and a grantee that they fund. It's very different. How do you think about that difference and how do you think about holding grantees accountable once you have given them the grant? How do you help them succeed, help them stay motivated? Yeah, that is a great question because that's an area that, you know, over the last year, what we've done is check in on a milestone by milestone basis, support grantees in the way that we're able, but somewhat of an informal way via conversations with folks seeing what they raise and seeing what we can do to support them in the manner of making connections to other in the ecosystem, sometimes to researchers, sometimes to VCs. I'm very excited to expand what we're able to do in the manner.

of grantee support over the next year. So this looks like more grantee-focused events and community building and more formal programmified support for grantees. So the relationship of a grantee can continue with the Uniswop Foundation in a more formalized supportive way, even after a grant may be completed. And I think something that I didn't fully appreciate the importance of when I began this journey is support in the way of marketing and comms. I think I reflecting over the last year, I'm so proud of so many of the things that we have done, but we have really, you know, struggle to get the word out on a lot of our grantees work in the way of research, development, et cetera, just stemming from the fact that our Twitter account right now has

about like four, five thousand followers. So like when someone does something great, we haven't necessarily had the ability to build a platform, you know, or a set of programs to amplify it. And I think that is definitely a gap that exists within the foundation today that is being, you know, worked on and filled. So we're currently, you know, working with a marketing agency to build the foundation's profile and our ability to help support our grantees. But I think there's a lot more that we can do and are excited to do in the future. Another model that I've read about learned about and I think is super interesting when it comes to grants is optimism's retroactive public goods funding model where rather than give someone a grant up front, they give someone a grant

based on the success of that initiative or product or development, whatever it is. Have you ever thought about adapting that in any way? What are your thoughts on that? Could you see that model being used within the UNOSWOP Foundation? Yeah, I think it's a great question. I've actually had the opportunity to participate in some of the retro PGF, like voting rounds before for optimism. And I think it's awesome. I think for the foundation now, given our resources and the timeframe of the next year,

at least, it's not a focus area for us. We're really focused on particularly with the launch of V4, like building and deploying those big grants programs. But I will say, you know, we're watching how retro PGF develops and it could be something we explore more in the future. So you mentioned this or maybe hinted at it a little bit in the beginning of our conversation, but recently Uniswap Labs made the decision to turn on a fee for the interface. And I think there are pros and cons of this. How do you kind of think about it? Did the foundation have anything to do with this decision?

I would love to get your thoughts on this decision. Yeah. So it's definitely been a hot topic over the past two days since Hayden announced it. Labs is a separate organization from us. So we are not involved in those kinds of decisions that anyone within the ecosystem makes. But I will say, I guess, in terms of like my view on that decision, I think companies building on open source public goods and protocols like uniswiswisputs. Being able to do that sustainably is a good thing.

Uniswop has never really generated revenue before, or at least, you know, I haven't seen. They've been like building in the space for the last several years without generating any revenue. And I think for anyone who wants the space to succeed, like there have to be sustainable business models for building on not just Uniswop, but other protocols as well, lending protocols, just Ethereum as a base chain. as we pivot our view to V4 and how we will support hook developers, folks building new financial primitives, protocols focused on hooks, even routers that will, you know, take the swapper to these hooks and kind of define what the swapper journey is. Those grantees, the folks we work with and the folks who are building in the ecosystem

otherwise, will have to be able to do that in a sustainable way. They will have to generate some kind of livelihood from doing. that in order for us to be successful or else you risk all of these things require maintenance, require growth, require evolution, and without the ability to create business models to support yourself, you're lacking that and we'll go to do something else. And so I think labs turning on fees, it will go to show, hey, it is possible to generate fees building on uniswap. Awesome. So looking forward, what are you most excited about? How would you like to see the foundation and the UNOSOP ecosystem grow,

what does success over the next year, year and a half plus look like for you? Going back to those three goals, I lined up in the beginning. So developers, researchers, and value creation, capture distribution, I think really over the next year, seeing not only V4, obviously, launching,

but also a number of interfaces, teams, applications, and proving that thesis, proving that point that there are generating net new organic revenue to contribute to the protocol flywheel in a way that I think, you know, we're seeing today, but we'll see with more focus and potentially see more of once before has launched and Pocs are live. I think we're very excited for the TLDR conference in March, as well as being able to support researchers both through that fellowship and through some additional researcher working groups we're putting together to really improve upon LP experience and

Swapper experience through digging into some of those questions related to MEV, LVR, etc. And seeing some of those, some of that research actually materialize in public goods, hooks or hooks otherwise that companies are building to really make kind of orders of magnitude improvement to the experience of folks using the protocol. And then supporting governance in kind of like chart charting a path to answering the fee capture and distribution question is another core part of our plan for the upcoming year that we're also excited about. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to see you guys continue to push forward against all of those goals. Thank you so much. And it's been so awesome to have you on, Devin. Thanks so much, Brea. This has been fun. I'm a big fan of the podcast. So very cool

to be on and thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.Vicc. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.