Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) voted against the final proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on the BNB Chain using the Wormhole bridge, the Uniswap DAO forum showed.
The government proposal to deploy the latest iteration of Uniswap on the BNB Chain was submitted on February 2nd by 0xPlasma Labs on behalf of the Uniswap Community, after passing the temperature check with 20 million (80.28%) yes votes, and 4.9 million ( 19.72%) choose no. On February 5, the venture company used 15 million UNI holdings to vote against the move.
At the time of publication, only 3% of UNI tokens had voted, which resulted in 23.4 million votes. The voting period is scheduled to end on February 10.
Behind the disagreement is the cross bridge chosen for deployment. The proposal uses the Wormhole bridge, while a16z supports the use of LayerZero as an interoperability protocol.
The venture partner expressed his intention to choose LayerZero as the deployment bridge during the temperature check. Eddy Lazzarin, head of engineering at a16z, commented on the January 31 proposal discussion:
“To be unambiguous, we at a16z will vote 15m tokens to LayerZero if we are technically able. And we will be able to during the Snapshot votes. So, for “temperature check” purposes, count us this way.
In its proposal, 0xPlasma Labs noted that stakeholders in the Uniswap ecosystem “have expressed their desire to see a trust-minimized bridge used for governance for the new Uniswap v3 deployment on the BNB Chain.”
Based on the technical assessment of the four bridges and “extremely complex discussions and voting in Snapshot, the community chose the Wormhole bridge for the deployment of Uniswap v3 on the BNB Chain,” the proposal states. The second position was held by the LayerZero team, with 17 million votes.
In 2022, the Wormhole protocol suffered one of the biggest exploits targeting the bridge, which resulted in the loss of 120,000 Wrapped Ether (wETH) tokens, worth $321 million at the time. An attacker found a vulnerability in the protocol’s smart contract and was able to print 120,000 wETH on Solana without collateral before exchanging ETH.
LayerZero Labs is part of the a16z venture portfolio. In March, a protocol dedicated to omnichain decentralized applications raised $135 million in a funding round led by a16z and Sequoia, among other investors, achieving unicorn status with a valuation of $1 billion.