Security Council Member Self-Nomination Template
Please keep your answers as concise as possible while conveying all relevant information.
All nominations will require 8 Top 100 delegate approvals.
Please indicate if you are running to be the Council Lead or a Council Member: Council Member
Does this nomination represent an individual or organization: Organization ****
Candidate country of residence (or, if an entity, incorporation and principle place of business): USA
Have you previously served on Optimism’s Security Council: No
Have you previously served on any other Council or Board in the Collective: No
Are you a representative of OP Labs: No
Are you a representative of another OP Chain: No
If you are a delegate, please provide the link to your delegate profile: N/A
If you are a member of the Citizens’ House, please link to your most recent attestation here: No
Please outline your contributions, and their impact, to the Optimism ecosystem to date:
- Uniswap was one of the first ever DeFi apps deployed to Optimism, more than 3 years ago in July 202. Before that, Unipig was one of the earliest proof of concepts in Ethereum application scaling.
- Uniswap is one of the most used applications across all Superchain L2s (here) as well as the most popular DEX on Optimism with 60%+ market share (here).
- In addition to the scale and positive impact of Uniswap stemming from our deployment on multiple Superchain L2s, the Uniswap Foundation (”UF”), along with many Uniswap community members, have made additional positive contributions to the community, including:
- With the OP Grant to Uniswap early 2023, the UF alongside Uniswap community members were able to successfully deploy 3 Liquidity Mining campaigns for relatively sticky liquidity on major OP pools working with delegates from both the Optimism and Uniswap governance communities.
- The work done by Uniswap community members, Uniswap Labs, and Across on ERC-7683 focuses on establishing standards for crosschain intent fulfillment, which greatly reduces the interop friction for any dapp users needing users to bridge assets or fill transactions across chains.
- The UF recently co-sponsored a proposal with Whetstone Research to introduce new fee tiers on Base in order to provide more competitive pricing to swappers (here). If successful, the insights gathered will be informative and we may expand these fee tiers to other Superchain L2s.
Please demonstrate any non-Optimism experience you believe is relevant to this role:
Our team has helped to grow the Uniswap governance community over the past two years, building strong working relationships with a large number of delegates from a wide range of organizations, recently hosting 40 delegates at a governance-specific workshop called Govswap the day before EthCC in Brussels. Working with these members of the community, we have seen the UF’s participation as a major stakeholder in Uniswap governance proposals (delegating votes to post a proposal or posting it ourselves) drop from ~60% in 2023 to ~25% so far in 2024. We have an acute appreciation for the human and technical intricacies of various governance processes, and will act as good stewards in this role’s “oracle” responsibilities.
Elsewhere, we have recently taken a more active role in developing and auditing smart contracts for use by the Uniswap ecosystem, including Uniswap v4, where a team member is a leading contributor to the periphery repo and is intimately involved in the audit process, and Unistaker, where we managed mechanism design, contract development, and the security audit process.
Please elaborate on your technical background, including your github handle (this will be used to calculate your github expertise score and will be added to your nomination before it goes to a vote by the Foundation):
Chirag Narang was most recently VP of Product at Dapper Labs, where he was responsible for Flow’s strategic direction and execution across core protocol, smart contract language, and developer experience, managing a team of 50 Engineers and 6 PMs.
Erin Koen spent two years (2020-2022) as a full-stack engineer at Avantgarde Finance, working on the Enzyme asset management app and its supporting infrastructure. He subsequently helped to start Avantgarde’s asset management business, managing the development of custom smart contracts to enable jurisdictionally compliant flows of funds into onchain investment vehicles.
The UF’s Github can be found here.
Please elaborate on your experience with relevant member (or Lead) requirements:
As described here, the primary requirements of a member of the Optimism Security Council are to be available and communicate well under pressure, thoughtfully execute protocol upgrades and other proposals approved by Optimism Governance, and the manage private keys securely.
The UF is well-suited to satisfy these requirements. We regularly coordinate between members of not only the Uniswap Protocol ecosystem but also across other DeFi and chain ecosystems. We have also helped to manage the execution and implementation of technical projects including smart contract and app development, security audits, and governance votes. We maintain close working relationships with stakeholders of all stripes and pride ourselves on being thorough and responsive.
Further, we have managed the creation and execution of numerous onchain votes for the Uniswap Protocol since our founding two years ago and stay informed regarding those votes in which we are not principal participants. This experience can easily translate into prompt, safe execution of Optimism Governance-approved actions.
Finally, our team manages onchain accounts to administer our UNI treasury as well as a portion of our grants budget. The signers on those accounts have developed and maintained protocols for transaction hygiene as well as key management.
Please describe your philosophy on what makes a good Security Council member:
Coming from the Uniswap ecosystem, we understand that security is paramount to the longterm success of protocols. Often times security only becomes a focus after a crisis, but we believe that best practices for proactive security is how we maintain operational excellence as Council members. This is manifested in Uniswap through consistent audits and reviews to help establish frameworks for best understanding risks as we did with the Crosschain Bridge Assessment report.
While we can do everything to protect against security risks, unfortunately we must also plan for worst case scenarios. This involves war rooming at any hour, constant and transparent communications, as well as the technical competency to participate in recovery. Although we have been fortunate as a protocol, it comes with hard work behind the scenes and working with trusted partners across the ecosystem. Our philosophy here is to maintain this level of operational and technical excellence, while continuing to uphold the highest standards of communication and integrity.
Please disclose any anticipated conflicts of interest:
n/a
Please verify that you understand you may be removed from this role via the Representative Removal proposal type in the Operating Manual: Confirmed
Please verify that you understand that election is subject to successful completion of a Foundation screen which may include KYC/AML, sanctions screening, and a requirement to sign a standard contract: Yes.
Please verify that you are able to commit ~5 active hours / month to fulfill the Member Responsibilities. Please note that there is an “on-call” aspect to this role that is not fully encompassed in the active hours estimate: Yes