Last week, we announced two new funding categories at the Uniswap Foundation: Protocol and Security. Today, we’re excited to unveil a $1.2M grant to Auditless to lead the Protocol Grants Program. This Program will identify opportunities to expand and strengthen the protocol tech stack, design grants to achieve new opportunities, and then work closely with grantees to execute.

As we discussed in our blog post last week, the Uniswap Foundation’s new Protocol grants funding category will support continued Uniswap Protocol innovation, and facilitate stronger feedback loops between our stakeholders and protocol development. With this new funding category we aim to improve the experience for our swappers, LPs, developers, and more for years to come.

However, funding future protocol innovation comes with a specific set of challenges: this work is highly consequential, and requires significant context and product vision to execute well. To implement successfully and to provide the best outcomes for the ecosystem, the Uniswap Foundation sought out a strategic advisor to lead protocol and market research initiatives, design a holistic roadmap, and collaborate with and guide our grantees. To do this, we are allocating a $1.2M grant to Auditless to spearhead the Protocol Grants Program.

This grant represents the creation of a new node within the Uniswap ecosystem. Auditless will be funded for at least a year, and will build a team in order to achieve its goals.

Through this grant, Auditless will initiate the Protocol Grants Program. They will build a team organized around creating value for all of our stakeholders through protocol development. Protocol upgrades and new protocol layers will aim to reduce transaction costs and latency, increase protocol flexibility and scalability, and strengthen Uniswap’s value proposition as a developer platform. To do this, Auditless will build relationships with the Protocol’s core stakeholders, stay on the cutting edge of DeFi innovation, and design grants to support the continued development and innovation of the protocol. Auditless will also collaborate closely with the grantee teams, and facilitate collaboration between the grantees, existing protocol contributors, and core stakeholders.

As an example of their future work, Auditless may spec out protocol hook grants in anticipation of the launch of Uniswap v4, and work closely with grantee teams to launch those hooks. They will also explore opportunities for future protocol expansion and improvement, which could extend to token issuance, routing, lending, and more.

In addition, Auditless will contribute to business development, marketing, and coordination with other UF Grants Leads to build programs that complement the launch of new protocols or supporting protocol infrastructure.

Grant KPIs and core deliverables will be in line with the core Protocols workstream goals defined in our previous blog post: improving core user experience by reducing execution cost and latency, while exploring other opportunities to further create value for all stakeholders.

Auditless is a protocol strategy and development consultancy with the objective of radically improving the performance of protocol teams through strategic advisory and protocol implementation projects focused on high-impact, high-uncertainty and research-heavy problems. In past work, Auditless designed and built the Aera treasury management protocol from the ground up in collaboration with Gauntlet, built a time traveling EVM debugger, and advised 10+ crypto founders on product and strategy.

At the helm of Auditless is Peteris Erins, a pioneer in Ethereum developer tooling and a respected figure in the crypto space. Peteris' highly cross-functional experience and achievements position him and his team as the ideal recipients for this grant. He also writes weekly essays on protocol product management and strategy which are read by leaders across the space. Prior to crypto, Peteris was the PM for Kedro, a machine learning framework which became McKinsey’s first open source project.

“Uniswap’s strategy is deeply intertwined with research and technical details. On one hand it is a large category-leading protocol with a significant responsibility to its community and holders. On the other hand, there is a constant ambition to take novel protocol ideas from zero to one,” notes Peteris. "v4 has opened up a rich design space for hooks ranging from simple extensions to the creation of new protocols which we are eager to explore.”

With Auditless' expertise and the strategic guidance of Peteris, Uniswap Foundation looks forward to unlocking new possibilities for users, developers, and the broader Uniswap community. The grant to Auditless is a step towards unlocking a future where the Uniswap Protocol leads not just in terms of trading volume, but as a hub of innovation, developer engagement, and user experience in DeFi.