Extension of Uniswap Incentive Campaign Infrastructure (UniV3 + UniV4 Merkle Router Oracles)

Summary

With reference to the Unichain and Uniswap v4 Liquidity Incentive Proposal passed last year, this proposal requests approval to extend the infrastructure that powers the current Uniswap liquidity incentive programs.

The middleware contracts used to route and deploy incentives (Merkle Router Oracle contracts for UniV3 and UniV4) were originally deployed with a fixed end date of March 10, 2026, as the initial proposal was structured for a 12-month program.

Because these contracts have an immutable expiration timestamp, they cannot be extended. To continue running incentive campaigns beyond March 10, 2026, new versions of these middleware contracts have been deployed with a new expiration date of March 10, 2030.

This proposal requests governance approval to:

• Remove the expiring middleware contracts
• Register the newly deployed contracts
• Enable campaign creation through the new contracts

No other components of the system are being modified.

What Is Changing (and What Is Not)

What is changing:

• The Merkle Router Oracle contracts used to route incentive campaigns will be replaced with newly deployed versions.
• Incentive routing will move from the old contracts to the new ones.

What is NOT changing:

• The Aera vault remains the same.
• The final incentive distribution contracts remain the same.
• Incentive budgets, token parameters, and governance structure, including DUNI’s ability to withdraw UNI from the Aera vault, remain unchanged.
• No new permissions are introduced.

This is a backend infrastructure update required due to the fixed expiration of the original middleware contracts.

Why Governance Approval Is Required

The contracts being replaced are owned by the Uniswap timelock. Because of this, updating them requires an on-chain governance proposal.

There is no way to modify the expiration date of the existing contracts. The only path forward is:

1. Deploy new middleware contracts with a later expiration date.
2. Have governance formally register them.
3. Transition campaign routing to the new contracts.

Without this approval, once the current contracts expire on March 10, 2026, it will no longer be possible to create new incentive campaigns.

Next Steps

The proposal will follow the standard Uniswap governance process.

The proposed process is:

1. Collect feedback from the community on this forum post - done
2. Submit a Snapshot vote to signal community approval for registering the new middleware contracts - current
3. If the Snapshot vote passes, submit the corresponding on-chain governance proposal to execute the contract updates via the Uniswap timelock - next

Because the existing middleware contracts expire on March 10, 2026 , and the governance process requires time to complete, there may be a brief period where new incentive campaigns cannot be created while the proposal progresses through Snapshot and the on-chain vote.