Uniswap DAO Selects Wormhole Bridge for Deploying Uniswap V3 on BNB Chain
Uniswap, the largest Decentralised Exchange (DEX) based on daily trading volume has been the focus of the crypto market in the last few weeks. 0xPlasma labs released a draft proposal to deploy Uniswap V3 on Binance’s BNB chain and this proposal if approved would deploy Uniswap V3 to BNB Chain connected to Ethereum via the cross-chain bridging solution. The community performed a temperature check regarding the cross-chain bridge preferences in order to enable cross-chain governance and messaging between Ethereum and BNB Chain.
This temperature check proposal consisted of four major cross-chain bridging providers — Wormhole, Layerzero, Celer and Debridge. By the end of January 2023 when the temperature check was finalised, the wormhole bridge had received majority support. It was selected as the preferred cross-chain bridging provider for deploying Uniswap V3 on the BNB chain. The process then shifted to a final and official on-chain vote to confirm the cross-chain bridge before deployment began with the voting period set from 5-Feb-2023 to 10-Feb-2023.
While this process had been in news for quite a while now, it broke the headlines with venture capital firm A16z choosing to vote against the proposal favouring the use of wormhole bridging service. This became a matter of focus as A16z could be considered one of the primary backers of another cross-chain bridging solution considered in an earlier temperature check vote (LayerZero). This vote which was backed by a considerable amount — nearly 15 million UNI tokens had sparked a market-wide debate on the VC trying to dominate the protocol and trying to bring about a centralised influence in a decentralized environment.
This was also viewed as a battle between rivals considering the fact that wormhole is backed by another VC giant Jump Crypto. Jump Crypto had clarified that they won’t be participating in the entire voting process, while A16z’s group had clarified that they had previously expressed their support towards Layerzero and would have used the same amount of tokens, but was incapable of participating in the temperature check due to the custodial set-up of its tokens. The end results remained in favour of using wormholes, supported by 65.89% of voters, despite some whales participating in the on-chain vote and expressing their opposition to its use.
Some of the other participants who voted against the usage of wormhole bridge include — crypto hedge fund manager Jesse Walden (jessewldn) [8 Million UNI], and blockchainucla, a group of pro-crypto students from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) [4.5 Million UNI]. Large whales who voted in favour of the proposal are — crypto firm ConsenSys [7.03 Million UNI], the Founder of MetaMask, GFX Labs — a DeFi platform [4.92 Million UNI], Robert Leshner, the CEO of crypto lending platform Compound Labs [5.76 Million UNI], Blockchain at Michigan — a student-run organization at the University of Michigan [3.5 Million UNI] and Monet Supply [3.3 Million UNI].
While this vote has been completed successfully and deployment went live as scheduled, a market-wide discussion concerning the governance structure for cross-chain app deployments has been sparked by this particular vote. While the vote has been approved, many have expressed their opposition to the deployment of Uniswap V3 on the BNB chain using wormhole bridging solutions. To be more accurate, they have expressed discontent over the fact that this deployment uses only a single bridging solution instead of using multiple bridges.
This idea seems to be gaining traction in both the Uniswap community and the market as a whole. The voting result for this proposal remained unchanged despite strong suggestions for a multi-bridging solution as projected deployment on BNB Chain is very urgent. This is due to the fact that Uniswap’s v3 commercial license expires on 1-April-2023, and the license forbids the introduction of imitation protocols on other platforms. A new bridge assessment committee has been formed in Uniswap governance DAO as a result of the discussion surrounding multi-bridge usage. This committee will create a new structure that will act as a roadmap for further cross-chain deployment.
This incident has clearly cited the need and increased demand for multi-bridging/bridge aggregation solutions. Deploying such a service is a win-win scenario for all parties involved. But, it’s very rare to find such service providers in the market today. Luckily, here at Kana Labs, our team has had similar thoughts and had worked in pioneering such a product — our chain-agnostic multi-chain multi-briding SDK top of which various developers could build their dApps. Our aggregated bridging layer is made of a combination of proprietary asset bridges and third-party messaging protocols (Wormhole, Layer-Zero, Celer Network and Axelar). Building on top of our SDK helps improve interoperability on the whole with a specific focus on reducing overall transaction timing(super fast cross-chain token swap), lowering transaction failure probability and best rates on each cross-chain transaction via smart routing algorithm to identify good token pricing and faster transaction routes. Developers and Founders can use our bridge aggregation featured SDK to access Solana, Aptos, Polygon and Neon EVM chains. Users can use our DeFi super app (Web app) platform to make transactions across chains with the best rates and fastest transaction timing.
