Wormhole Wins Vote to Be Uniswap’s Designated Bridge to BNB Channel

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Wormhole, the crypto bridge platform, won a community vote on Tuesday to become the official governance bridge for Uniswap — the largest decentralized exchange by trading volume — when its version 3 platform hits Binance’s BNB Chain.

Victory grants Wormhole valuable new territory in an ongoing battle between bridge platforms – vital pieces of cryptographic infrastructure that allow users to transmit assets and other data between blockchains. The Wormhole Bridge will eventually be used to give Uniswap v3 users on BNB Chain the ability to participate in Uniswap DAO’s Ethereum-based governance process.

The Uniswap DAO, which allows holders of Uniswap’s United token to vote on major strategic decisions, voted 62% in favor of Wormhole. LayerZero, one of Wormhole’s main competitors, came in second with 37%.

The vote was technically a “signal” proposal, meaning passing it does not automatically install Wormhole as Uniswap’s official BNB bridge. Instead, the result means that Wormhole will be listed in an upcoming official Uniswap v3 rollout proposal on the BNB channel.

Uniswap aims to roll out on BNB Chain ahead of its commercial source license expires April 1. Once the license expires, imitators will be able to clone Uniswap’s code to launch competing projects.

In a previous suggestion of “temperature taking”, 80% of UNI voters indicated that they were in favor of integrating Uniswap v3 with BNB Chain. This proposal, however, named Celer — a bridge rig that lost this week’s vote — as Uniswap’s bridge partner. With Wormhole winning in this week’s vote, the Uniswap DAO rejected a proposal from the CEO of Celer to deploy Uniswap v3 on BNB Chain using several different bridge providers.

Cross Bridge Attacks

The main point of community debate approaching this week’s vote, which took place between January 27 and 31, revolved around security. Historically, crypto bridges have proven to be a prime target for hackers. Wormhole was the target of a $325 million attack in February 2022. This attack is still the fifth largest in the history of cryptography, according to rektbut the stolen funds were eventually refunded to users by Jump Crypto, a major backer of Wormhole.

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A Wormhole victory signals that the service has largely recovered from this reputational blow – at least in the eyes of the UNI governance community.

Over 8,000 crypto wallets participated in this week’s proposal, representing a total of 45 million UNI governance tokens. The tokens used in this week’s vote were worth $300 million combined with Current UNI tariff $6.60.

The vote came a day after LayerZero, Wormhole’s main competitor in the race, faces allegations that he worked to conceal a critical “backdoor” vulnerability in his code. LayerZero denied the allegations and said the allegations were aimed at damaging its reputation in the run-up to the Uniswap vote.