Can Uniswap Successfully Migrate To BNB Chain Amid Ongoing VC Battle?

The Uniswap community on its governance forum overwhelmingly supported a “temperature check” proposal to deploy the Uniswap v3 protocol on a new chain. With 80% of the vote, Uniswap’s UNI governance token holders had previously approved moving the decentralized exchange onto the BNB Chain, which is often considered as a rival to Ethereum.

A16z’s Big No To Proposal

However, things heated up when Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a California-based venture capitalist, voted against the proposal with a massive stake of 15 million UNI. As a result of the 15 million votes that were cast against the measure on A16z, some skeptics have begun to question the ability of Uniswap governance to act in a manner that is in the best interest of the protocol. Those who possess a bigger number of tokens typically have a greater proportion of voting power and are able to significantly influence the path that a particular proposal takes.

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During the temperature check, the partners of the venture capital firm said that they planned to vote for LayerZero to serve as the deployment bridge. In the discussion held on January 31, Eddy Lazzarin, who is the head of engineering at a16z, offered the following comment:

To be totally unambiguous, we at a16z would have voted 15m tokens toward LayerZero if we were technically able to. And we will be able in future Snapshot votes. So, for the purposes of a “temperature check”, please count us this way.

ConsenSys Casts In Favor

The next big cast of votes come from ConsenSys which is also responsible for creating the popular MetaMask digital wallet. According to statistics provided by Tally, the Web3 development company voted in favor of the proposal that would see the third version of the decentralized exchange Uniswap be deployed on Binance’s BNB Chain.

ConsenSys, cast almost 7.03 million UNI tokens which roughly translates to 17.58% of the voting power that has further boosted the proposal in the way of getting launched on the BNB chain. At the time of publication, there had been a total of 68.82 million votes cast with only 6.8% of all UNI tokens having participated in the voting process. Currently, 77.56% of the participants have “yes” to the proposal, 22.07% have shown disinterest in the proposal while 0.36% have abstained from voting.

In spite of the fact that there is a near-unanimous backing for the proposal to be approved, the low participation rate leaves room for other stakeholders to influence the outcome in unexpected ways. The votes of heavyweight investors such as Paradigm and Polychain have not yet been tallied, and it remains to be seen whether there is even more drama to come out of this. The voting process is expected to come to a close on February 10th.

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