In a surprising turn of events, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, more commonly known as a16z, has moved to vote against the final proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on the BNB chain using the Wormhole bridge. According to the data sourced from Tally.com, the Uniswap DAO forum indicates that a16z has thrown its full weight to move against the proposal.

At the time of writing, only 5.2% of all the Uniswap (UNI) tokens have cast a vote, out of which 71.3% have voted in support of the proposal while 28.69% have voted against it, almost all of which have been contributed by none other than a16z. Venture capital firm a16z holds about 15 million UNI tokens, all of which have been utilized to vote against it.

In fact, according to a report by CoinTelegraph on 5 February, a16z had been leading the overall vote, outweighing those in support - with only 35.85% in support and 64.13% against the proposal. However, in the past two days, things have changed as more UNI token holders have joined to support the proposal to launch Uniswap v3 on the BNB chain.

For some context, this governance proposal to deploy the latest Uniswap iteration on the BNB chain was submitted on 2 February, 2023 by oxPlasma Labs on behalf of the Uniswap community. The proposal passed the temperature check with 20 million (80.28%) votes in favor and 4.9 million (19.72%) votes not in favor.

As of writing this article, only 5.2% of UNI tokens had cast a vote, resulting in about 52.93 million votes that have been cast so far. This voting period is scheduled to end on 10 February 2023.

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But why is a16z against this proposal?

The primary reason behind a16z throwing all its weight against the proposal is quite simple.. It is because of the cross-chain bridge that has been chosen for the deployment of Uniswap's v3 on the BNB chain. The proposal uses the Wormhole bridge, while a16z supports the use of LayerZero as the interoperability protocol.

On 31 January 2023, partners of the venture capital firm spoke up on the governance discussion ahead of the temperature check, expressing their intention to vote for LayerZero as the deployment bridge. Even Eddy Lazzarin, the head of engineering at a16z posted a message on the proposal discussion ahead of the vote.

“To be totally unambiguous, we at a16z would have voted 15m tokens toward LayerZero if we were technically able to. And we will be able in future Snapshot votes. So, for the purposes of a “temperature check”, please count us this way.”

It must also be noted that in 2022, the Wormhole bridge suffered one of the largest exploits on a cross-chain bridge ever - resulting in a loss of 120,000 Wrapper Ether (wETH) tokens worth around $325 million at that time. The attacker had exploited a vulnerability in the protocol's smart contract and was able to mint 120,000 wETH on Solana without any collateral before swapping it for actual ETH tokens.

And to further add to why a16z is leaning heavily towards LayerZero is because LayerZero Labs forms a part of a16z's venture portfolio. In March 2022, LayerZero Labs, which has been dedicated to building omnichain decentralized applications raised $135 million in a funding round led by marquee investors like a16z and Sequoia, among others, earning the unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation.

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