Uniswap's introduction of front-end fees: the beginning of centralization for the team's product?

Author: Haotian (@tmel0211)

Uniswap founder Hayden's "paid" announcement may be short, but it contains a lot of valuable information:

1) Uniswap's "fees" are not for making money, but for reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Uniswap maintains the front-end app and develops the mobile app, which is inherently a decentralized operational approach. This inevitably leads to a large amount of operational service costs, especially since expanding and promoting Uniswap Wallet is almost entirely centralized. The development and operation, channel operation, regulatory compliance, and security risk maintenance are all direct cost increases. Implementing additional fees can effectively subsidize operational costs and support the faster expansion of Uniswap's product matrix deployment.

If it's just a matter of making money, it seems more effective for Uniswap to try changing the code logic of the backend protocol, and the profits will come faster?

2) Uniswap protocol and Uniswap labs are two different things.

Uniswap is attempting to inform the Uni community through this highly controversial unilateral "notice" that only the Uniswap protocol is decentralized, and both web and mobile terminals are owned by Uniswap, with additional charges estimated to be just the beginning of "centralized" measures. KYC regulatory policies will also be inevitable on these channels, as no company can develop without compliance issues. The 0.15 fee rate was announced directly without a vote, which has already indicated the problem. Voting is only effective for changes to the Uniswap protocol itself.

3) Uniswap's future product matrix will compete with MetaMask

As we can see, MetaMask, which has not been issuing coins, is exploring commercialization of products such as institution MetaMask, MetaMask Snap, and portfolio dashboard. Occasionally hinting at the news of issuing tokens, they have earned a lot of transaction fees. This web2+web3 Pua business model allows them to make money while standing or lying down, which makes Uniswap envy. Uniswap's protocol and product segmentation strategy is obviously paving the way for the commercialization of the subsequent product matrix, strategically covering a larger and wider ecological position.

4) Uniswap's governance token may be indefinitely isolated.

Uniswap has made such a significant decision, and although Uni holders have expressed their protests and confusion, the official seems to completely not care. The expected value of Uni tokens has been delayed in being empowered, and even the governance rights of voting have been stripped away. Even if voting is useful, how can the community's voting weight exceed the "official" one? Alas, in short, it is a tragedy for holders.

5) If users do not want to accept this 0.15% fee, they can choose to call the API interface of a third-party wallet or use other DeFi aggregators, provided that these services all directly use the Uniswap backend protocol. However, Uniswap may not be concerned about user loss, which seems to benefit aggregators in the market, but it is difficult to say whether all aggregators directly call the backend protocol. Uniswap must have done an economic calculation and trade-off between potential user loss and 0.15% fee revenue.

Moreover, it is expected that some "fishing" front-ends, which claim to bypass the 0.15% fee, will emerge to carry out scams. The market will eventually tell everyone that choosing Uniswap official and paying an extra 0.15% may be the best and safest option.

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