A16z Controls Uniswap By Downvoting BNB Chain Deployment
The VC giant used its huge voting power to try to stop Uniswap governance from making a plan.
Crypto venture capital firm a16z used its 15 million UNI tokens to vote against a plan that would have used the Wormhole bridge to deploy Uniswap V3 on BNB Chain.
So far, the results of the proposal vote show that a16z’s large number of tokens have allowed it to control about half of the votes, which has swayed the decision in its favor.
On Feb. 2, a plan was made to use the latest version of Uniswap on the BNB Chain. It was made by 0xPlasma Labs for the Uniswap Community after a temperature check showed that 80% of people liked the idea.
The voting period ends on February 10, and as of this writing, only 3%, or 30.5 million votes, had been cast. For a vote to pass, a quorum of 4% or 40 million UNI tokens must be reached. A16z has done everything it can to prevent this from happening.
Uniswap Run by VCs
The move has made the crypto community angry, and they want to know why a protocol that claims to be decentralized would do something like this.
You’re being lied to about the governance of UNI@a16z could control 41.5M UNI through 11 wallets, which represents more than 4% of the supply
The choice of cross-chain bridge in the proposal seems to be what made people decide to vote against it. Wormhole was chosen by 0xPlasma Labs, while LayerZero was chosen by a16z.
“As a result of a very complex discussion and voting on the Snapshot, the community chose the Wormhole bridge for the Uniswap v3 deployment on BNB Chain (with 28M votes),” 0xPlasma Labs noted.
Also, in March 2022, a16z led an investment round of $135 million in the LayerZero blockchain interoperability protocol.
Chris Blec, who supports decentralization, said, “There are REAL anti-competition cartels in DeFi.” Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, said the following after the vote:
“On chain voting just means the large whale(s) control the blockchain then. Just like shareholders.”
? @a16z just used its full voting weight to squash a $UNI proposal to launch Uniswap protocol on BNB chain using @wormholecrypto bridge.
a16z is a large investor in Wormhole competitor, @LayerZero_Labs.
On the day, the Uniswap governance token lost 3.9% of its value. At the time this was written, UNI was trading at $6.91 after reaching a high of $7.30 during the day.
During the January rally, the token didn’t get much of a boost, and it only went up by 25%.
After the FTX crash in November, UNI prices dropped below $5 and have been mostly flat since mid-August. Also, UNI is still down 84.6% from its all-time high, which was just under $45 in May 2021.
