The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) used all 15 million UNI tokens at its disposal to oppose deploying the Uniswap v3 protocol on the BNB Chain via the Wormhole app.
The Plasma Labs team put forward the relevant proposal. On January 22, in the preliminary vote, the community approved the initiative. As the cross-chain bridge for connecting Ethereum and BNB Chain they chose Wormhole.
The runner-up was the LayerZero app, in which a16z invested in March 2022.
According to The Block sources, the venture firm did not participate due to "custodial setup of its tokens". At the same time, the organisation noted that it intends to back the portfolio project.
“For absolute clarity, we at a16z would vote for LayerZero, using 15 million tokens, if we had the technical capability. And we will gain such capability in future Snapshot votes,” написал partner Andreessen Horowitz Eddy Lazarin.
The Block’s head of research Steven Zheng noted that a16z voted against an Uniswap-linked proposal for the first time. In his words, this was also the first time the firm had used all the tokens at its disposal.
From what I can tell this is the first time a16z voted against an Uniswap proposal and the first time the unloaded the entire 15M UNI vote clip.
— Steven (@Dogetoshi) February 5, 2023
The Wormhole project is supported by Jump Crypto. Voting on the Plasma Labs proposal will close on February 10.
The founder of Compound, Robert Leshner, joined the vote and supported deploying Uniswap v3 on the BNB Chain using Wormhole.
CEO Binance Changpeng Zhao noted that such voting demonstrates control by whales — just as in a traditional company, the largest shareholders make the decisions.
On chain voting just means the large whale(s) control the blockchain then. Just like shareholders. We were just discussing this at the conference yesterday.
— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) February 5, 2023
Co-founder of Tornado Cash Roman Semenov added that “people sold their votes to venture capitalists, and the rest did not bother voting”.
The people were given voting tokens, significantly more than VCs have. Even airdrop users, not counting LPs, were given way more tokens than a16z has, which totals around 4.2% across their wallets.
But the people sold their votes to VCs, and the rest don’t bother with voting.
— Roman Semenov 🇺🇦 🌪️ (@semenov_roman_) February 6, 2023
Meanwhile, Bubblemaps account presented data showing that a16z could control 41.5 million UNI through 11 wallets (4.15% of the supply).
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
4% is the required amount to pass any proposal 🧵↓ https://t.co/mVdTukYstD pic.twitter.com/u7l9kBFIWF
— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) February 5, 2023
In Bubblemaps notes that concerns about governance of UNI in 2021 were raised by analyst under the alias Cobie. He then stated that "decisions are not made by the community, but by a handful of powerful individuals."
Concerns about UNI’s governance were raised in July 2021 by @cobie
«Decisions are not made by the community, but instead by a handful of power brokers. Centralization often results in nepotism: is this governance theater to extract liquidity from the treasury?» pic.twitter.com/R7A2ScK36p
— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) February 5, 2023
Earlier, Cinneamhain Ventures partner Adam Kokran suggested that Uniswap allows the deployment of a user-verification system in the next version of the protocol.