In major news coming out of the BNB Smart Chain blockchain ecosystem, the biggest decentralized exchange by total-value-locked in DeFi, Uniswap is officially live on BSC.

According to voting data on the governance proposal, more than 55 million UNI token holders voted in favor of the proposal by 0x Plasma Labs to deploy Uniswap v3 on the BNB Chain. According to the latest statistics from Tally.com, 65.89% stand in favor of the proposal, while 33.57% remain against it.

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This proposal had been brought up in the Uniswap governance forum as a means to expand its reach and potentially drive further growth and adoption of decentralized finance (DeFi) through its suite of products, along with its decentralized exchange (DEX) operations and its automated market maker (AMM) mechanism.

According to the announcement, the protocol's expansion to the BNB chain offers the ecosystem several benefits and advantages, including user growth, lower transaction fees, and tapping into new geographical markets.  

The proposal by 0x Plasma Labs also states that the move to BNB Chain will enhance Uniswap's ability to serve all users within the Web3 space and marks a step towards increasing accessibility and liquidity for its own users.

Uniswap's expansion to BNB Chain also means that users will be able to leverage BNB Chain's ecosystem to trade and swap tokens across the network. This integration would also allow Uniswap to tap into liquidity pools with BNB Chain's DeFi developer community and also, in effect, increase awareness and adoption amongst more and more retail and institutional investors.

The proposal also stated that this launch would align with the DeFi industry's broader objective of bringing about greater accessibility and cross-chain compatibility in the ecosystem. Thus, this launch is expected to trigger further growth of both Uniswap and BNB Chain, resulting in a very amicable win-win situation.

However, this development did not come with its own set of troubles. Early in February, one of the biggest crypto investors and venture capital fund, Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, voted against the deployment of Uniswap on the BNB Chain.

Read more: VC firm a16z votes against deploying Uniswap V3 on the BNB chain!

As is evident from the Tally.com chart above, a16z still remains one of the biggest voters in the whole pie, but still managed to lose its bid to prevent Uniswap's expansion into the BNB Chain. In fact, early in February, it had managed to gain the biggest share of votes against the proposal and even held out for quite some time before other token holders on the Uniswap governance forum weighed in to support the proposal.

Why is a16z against this proposal?

The primary reason behind a16z throwing its hat down against the proposal is very simple. The reason behind it is that a16z supports the use of LayerZero as the cross-chain interoperability protocol instead of the Wormhole bridge as was proposed in the proposal to deploy Uniswap V3 on the BNB chain. LayerZero also happens to be a part of a16z's investment portfolio in the sector and it is natural it would want that one to be used as the interoperability bridge instead of Wormhole.

However, on the other hand, it must also be noted that Wormhole has been victim to one of the biggest exploits on a cross-chain bridge ever - resulting in a loss of 120,000 Wrapped Ether (wETH) tokens worth around $325 million at that time. Thus, Wormhole isn't without its problems either. But despite all that, the community has spoken and Uniswap V3 has gone live on the BNB Chain after the successful vote.

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