Venture capital leads Uniswap governance, a16z voting will push LayerZero to be selected as cross-chain bridge

Uniswap v3 is planning to deploy on the BNB Chain ahead of schedule due to the expiration of the Business Source License (BSL). However, subsequent governance voting has evolved into a competition between token holders with significant voting power and venture capital firms.

Uniswap v3 Migrating to BNB Chain

Earlier this month, Uniswap v3 passed a preliminary community vote called Temperature Check, with over 80% of the community members supporting the migration of v3 to the BNB Chain. The final consensus check vote is still pending.

The governance proposal stated that migrating to the BNB Chain has many reasons, including its low fees, large user base, which would help drive Uniswap adoption. However, it is mainly due to the introduction of the "Business Source License, BSL" when v3 was launched to prevent malicious forks.

Now that the BSL is set to expire in April, Uniswap v3 must take the opportunity to move to the BNB Chain to prevent the emergence of forked versions immediately after the license expires.

However, the upcoming decision on cross-chain bridges seems to involve a competition between the two major investor forces behind Uniswap, going beyond a typical community voting governance.

Wormhole vs. LayerZero

In a preliminary poll with options including Wormhole, LayerZero, deBridge, and cBridge, Wormhole is currently leading.

However, according to sources cited by The Block, a16z, with 1,500 voting power, could not participate in the preliminary poll due to its custody setup, potentially resulting in a very different outcome in the final vote.

Wormhole developers were acquired by Jump Trading as early as 2021, which naturally promotes the adoption of Wormhole in governance voting.

a16z, an investor in Uniswap and LayerZero, mentioned in a governance forum that they will cast 15 million votes for LayerZero in the final consensus check.

If calculated with the current vote count, a16z injecting 15 million votes would allow LayerZero to overtake Wormhole with a total of 32 million votes, surpassing Wormhole's 28 million votes.

An a16z spokesperson confirmed their participation in all on-chain governance votes, while Jump has not yet responded to this.