Uniswap Coming to BNB Chain? Governance Says Yes

Community governance that oversees decentralized exchange Uniswap has voted in favor of deploying on Binance-backed BNB Chain via cross-chain bridge Wormhole.

A total of 500 addresses participated in the vote, casting a total of 84.8 million votes. Overall, 65.89% of votes favored the proposal and 33.57% voted against, only 0.53% chose to abstain.

This particular proposal drew attention after prominent venture capital firm a16z used 15 million UNI tokens to vote against the proposal.

Another group that voted against the proposal was Variant Fund — an investor in other blockchain networks including Polygon, Aztec Network, Scroll and Aptos. 

Because those who hold more governance tokens tend to have greater voting power, community members raised concerns about how much influence venture capitalists have over decentralized protocols.

A16z roughly holds 64 million UNI tokens, with a majority of the tokens delegated to third-party participants. 

Despite this, not all a16z delegates voted against the proposal. Blockchain at Michigan, for example, used 3.5 million UNI tokens to vote in favor of the proposal.

Blockworks Research analyst Matt Fiebach believes that this is a positive sign for decentralization in protocols.

“The vote’s result against a16z shines a positive light on the VC’s decision to delegate tokens out to unbiased parties and highlights the benefits of decentralized governance,” Fiebach said.

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Deploying everywhere, for now

BNB Chain is not the only blockchain network that Uniswap is looking to deploy on. Governance proposals and discussions about deploying the decentralized exchange (DEX) onto Moonbeam, Boba Network and StarkNet are all in motion.

This is likely because Uniswap v3’s business source license (BSL) will expire in the coming months, Getty Hill, the co-founder of the delegate, GFX Labs, previously told Blockworks.

To prevent other protocols from copying Uniswap v3’s code, Hill believes that Uniswap governance may have adopted a “deploy everywhere” strategy.

“It’s much harder to fork the protocol if there’s already a Uniswap v3 deployment there,” Hill said.

Deploying on other chains has been quite successful for Uniswap thus far. Three months after launching on Polygon, the DEX captured almost 50% of its market share. 

Now that the vote has passed to deploy on the BNB chain, Fiebach notes that Uniswap will likely gain an even larger portion of the existing DEX market.

“It will be interesting to see how the proprietary UNI v3 concentrated liquidity model becoming open source on Apr. 1 impacts their dominance,” Fiebach said.

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