Uniswap fee switch proposal is killing the decentralized DAO model. Uniswap foundation activities move to Uniswap Labs, meaning... ...decision power moves from a non-profit organization governed by $UNI holders to a Delaware centralized corporation. - Most Foundation employees move to Uniswap Labs - The Foundation only keeps a tiny grants team - After the remaining ~$100M grants are deployed, the Foundation shuts down Thus $UNI token is no longer a DAO token but a token purely valued by buybacks/fees Uniswap will be able to generate. It's not a criticism but admitting the facts that: - The DAO model was indeed just pretending decentralization due to regulatory struggles - DAOs are inefficient at governing and allocating resources ---- Uniswap isn't the first to do it either: - Scroll fully shuts down the DAO and moved to centralized governance - Arbitrum's "Vision for the Future" moves many decisions to the core group of Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain Labs to 'fix inefficiencies' - Optimism Season 8 centralizes power by moving real decisions to curated stakeholder groups and councils while tokenholders only keep veto rights - Lido’s BORG model centralizes execution into legal foundations run by appointed directors while the DAO only sets high level direction ----- The famous a16z "Progressive Decentralization" model of finding PMF and exiting to the community for sufficient decentralization is dying. Or it was just simply pretending in the first place.

This OP governance post is eye opening where DAOs are heading: Op "embarked on a large-scale experiment in decentralized governance" "As we experiment, we learn more about the balance of power and other dynamics within our system" "Systems that are rigidly defined and slow to change struggle to adapt to changing conditions and often stagnate, losing to faster competitors or failing to innovate." "it’s time to update the governance system so that the Collective benefits from best-in-class decision making protocols" "introduce several important governance updates that leverage time-tested concepts from traditional political science and corporate governance"

Or this Arbitrum proposal "A Vision for the Future of Arbitrum" "Many of the bottlenecks facing the ArbitrumDAO is due to the lack of participation from The Arbitrum Foundation and Offchain Labs… We think it is time to rectify it and to be more actively involved to support the ArbitrumDAO." or “We expect the number of proposals will significantly diminish in favor of more informal feedback loops… before anything reaches the DAO.”