Uniswap BNB deployment passes with 66% yes votes despite a16z rejection

The proposal to deploy Uniswap V3 (UNI) to BNB Chain (BNB) was accepted by 65.89% yes votes on Feb. 10, even though Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) used its 15 million votes to oppose it on Feb. 6.

The results show that 65.89% agreed with the deployment, 33.57% voted against it, and another 0.53% abstained. ConsenSys, Compound Finance CEO Robert Leshner, and GFX Labs were amongst the most influential yes voters, with 7.03 million, 5.76 million, and 4.92 million UNI tokens, respectively.

The proposal

The deployment was 0xPlasma Labs CEO Ilia’s idea. Illia argued deploying Uniswap V3 to BNB Chain could bring an additional one to two million users as well as around $1 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL). He suggested leveraging wormholes to increase adoption for the Uniswap platform.

0xPlasma Labs submitted a proposal on Dec. 12, 2022, which secured an initial governance approval on Jan. 23, with over 80% of the participants voting yes.

a16z disagrees

0xPlasma Labs submitted another proposal on Feb.3 for final approval. On Feb. 6, a16z used all its 15 million UNI tokens to vote against the proposal. The company said it didn’t believe that the wormhole technology would offer the most secure bridging option, citing breaches and security failures.

16z’s voting bloc sparked questions about Uniswap’s decentralization. With the 41.5 million UNI tokens held in 11 different wallets, a16z represented more than 4% of the supply, which gave it an obvious advantage in governance proposals.