Wintermute DeFi Governance Digest: March 2025 | Week 3
17 MARCH 2025 | RESEARCH | AUTHORED BY CALLEN
This week’s proposals include Aave Labs requesting an Aave license for an RWA-focused money market called Horizon and Uniswap discussing an additional round of delegating voting power from the DAO’s Treasury; along with votes from Arbitrum to activate Timeboost and collect Nova fees, Uniswap funding the Uniswap Foundation with ~$120M UNI and allocating ~$45M UNI towards a Uniswap V4 and Unichain incentive program, and Aave voting to implement the new Aavenomics update.
Proposals
Aave (AAVE)
Proposal: [Temp Check] Building Horizon’s RWA Product: An Aave Licensed Instance for Institutions
Author: Aave Labs
Summary: Aave Labs is requesting a license instance of the Aave Protocol to launch Horizon – a RWA-focused lending market enabling institutions to use tokenized money market funds as collateral to borrow USDC and GHO at scale.
Key Points:
- The demand for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) is rising as tokenization enhances liquidity, lowers costs, and enables 24/7 programmable transactions.
- Currently, it’s estimated that there is ~$18.63B worth of RWA assets on chain.
- To capture the growing demand of the RWA market, Aave Labs is proposing to launch Horizon which will use a licensed version of the Aave Protocol.
- Horizon will be a RWA-focused money market allowing institutions to borrow USDC and GHO against tokenized money market funds.
- In return for using Aave Protocol architecture, a portion of Horizon’s profit will be allocated to the Aave DAO as follows:
Year 1: 50%
Year 2: 30%
Year 3: 15%
Year 4+: 10%
- Furthermore, should Horizon launch a token, 15% will be allocated to the Aave DAO as follows:
10% to the Aave DAO treasury
3% reserved for Aave ecosystem initiatives
2% airdropped to staked Aave (stkAAVE) holders
- It’s expected that Horizon will help drive GHO adoption, enhance its liquidity, and strengthen GHO’s role as a settlement asset.
Our Take: While there is a clear market for RWA’s and the proposal brings some nice benefits to GHO and additional revenue to the Aave DAO, the introduction of a new token from Aave Labs could create a divide over their future and focus.
Uniswap (UNI)
Proposal: [RFC] Treasury Delegation Round 2
Author: Tane
Summary: This proposal requests to delegate 10M – 20M worth of UNI Voting Power from the DAO’s Treasury across two Delegate cohorts based on an election.
Key Points:
- Treasury delegation began in December 2023 as a way to empower underrepresented Delegates by using 10M UNI from the DAO’s treasury to delegate Voting Power across active Delegates based on an election.
- The program has been greatly successful, however, the program was only meant to last for 1 year, which has now been exceeded.
- This proposal builds on the first delegation program and requests to allocate between 10M – 20M UNI in Voting Power to Delegates based on another election process.
- Furthermore, the new setup will have an expiry mechanism built in to ensure the delegated Voting Power is returned back to the DAO.
- To be eligible for the Treasury Delegation program, a Delegate must have:
No more than 1.5M UNI VP (not including prior treasury delegations)
Maintain a minimum 80% voting participation rate over the past 3 months
Maintain a minimum of 80% justification rate for all votes cast in their delegation thread
- There will be two cohorts with staggered election dates to ensure governance stability over time.
Our Take: The first round of Uniswap’s Treasury delegation has proven to be greatly successful for the DAO. We support the program’s renewal and welcome the new structure.
Votes
Arbitrum (ARB)
Proposal: [CONSTITUTIONAL] – Adopt Timeboost + Nova Fee Sweep
Status: Live.
Created: Mar 14, 2025.
Ends: Mar 28, 2025.
Leading Consensus: For – 41.26M ARB (99.90% of total votes).
Summary: This onchain proposal activates Timeboost and collects DAO fees from Arbitrum Nova. Timeboost enables auctions for the right to an express lane on both Arbitrum One and Nova, giving the winner a time advantage for transaction inclusion.
Uniswap (UNI)
Proposal: Unichain and Uniswap v4 Liquidity Incentives
Status: Live.
Created: Mar 14, 2025.
Ends: Mar 19, 2025.
Leading Consensus: For – 46.45M UNI (87.52% of total supply).
Summary: This onchain vote ratifies the deployment of ~$45M worth of UNI (with potential for additional incentives) to incentivize activity on Uniswap V4 and Unichain. The incentive program will be managed by Gauntlet.
Uniswap (UNI)
Proposal: Uniswap Unleashed
Status: Live.
Created: Mar 14, 2025.
Ends: Mar 19, 2025.
Leading Consensus: For – 60.41M UNI (85.55% of total votes).
Summary: This onchain vote ratifies the next phase for the Uniswap Foundation providing them with ~$120M worth of UNI in funding to carry out various growth objectives such as scaling network supply & demand, activating revenue for the DAO, and onboarding protocol core contributors.
Aave (AAVE)
Proposal: [ARFC] Aavenomics implementation: Part one
Status: Live.
Created: Mar 16, 2025.
Ends: Mar 19, 2025.
Leading Consensus: YAE – 815.2k AAVE (100% of total votes).
Summary: This Snapshot ratifies consensus around Aavenomics which introduces various changes to the Aave ecosystem, notably, Umbrella, a new finance committee, improved secondary liquidity for AAVE, ending the LEND to AAVE migration period, and buying back AAVE from the open market.