The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has against 1 final proposal voted to deploy Uniswap v3 on the BNB Chain using the Wormhole bridge.
Vote against proposal
0xPlasma Labs submitted the board proposal on February 2 on behalf of the Uniswap community to deploy the latest Uniswap iteration on the BNB blockchain. This proposal had a positive outcome with 80.28% of the voters in favor and 19.72% against.
On February 5, a venture firm voted against the move with 15 million UNI. At the time, only 3% of UNI tokens had been voted, resulting in 23.4 million votes. The voting period ends on February 10.
Disagreement is in Wormhole Bridge
The difference of opinion is not necessarily about turning off Uniswap on the BNB Chain, but about the use of the Wormhole bridge that should be used for this. Where the Wormhole Bridge is proposed, a16z actually supports the use of LayerZero as an interoperability protocol.
According to 0xPlasma Labs in the proposal, stakeholders within the Uniswap ecosystem want “trust-minimized bridges for governance” for the new Uniswap v3 deployment on the BNB chain. After technical evaluation of four bridges and extensive discussion and voting, the community selected the Wormhole Bridge as the best option for implementation. The LayerZero team finished 2nd with 17 million votes.
The Wormhole protocol suffered a serious exploit in 2022, losing 120,000 Wrapped Ethereum (wETH) tokens, which was then worth $321 million. An attacker discovered a weakness in the protocol’s smart contract and was able to store 120,000 wETH on Solana without collateral and then exchange it for ETH.
LayerZero Labs, in turn, is part of the portfolio of a16z venture. In March of last year, the protocol for decentralized omnichain applications raised another $135 million in a funding round led by a16z and Sequoia, among other investors, earning unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation. It is not yet known what the next step of Uniswap v3 will be now.