Brace Yourself for Bridge Wars

If you’re keeping track of the latest in the web3 world, you might have a hint for today’s edition title. In any case, here’s the full story.

Battle participants: Wormhole vs. LayerZero

Battleground: Uniswap Governance

It all started in December last year when OxPlasma released a proposal draft about launching Uniswap V3 on the BNB Chain. The reason behind this proposal was to ensure that Uniswap became the de facto DEX on BNB Chain before Uniswap’s license expiration in April (allowing anyone to fork Uniswap V3 code and deploy it on BNB Chain).

Therefore, making this proposal a topmost priority for Uniswap to attain a first-mover advantage on the BNB Chain by capturing as much TVL as possible before the numerous forks pop up.

However, there’s a caveat regarding the proposal before it can get approved by the community. That is – What bridge should the protocol used to enable cross-chain Uniswap governance messaging between Ethereum and BNB Chain?

That’s when the Uniswap governance forum became a battleground for bridges such as Wormhole, LayerZero, and others. However, with arguments put forth by various community members, it becomes pretty clear that the leading contenders of this battle are none other than Wormhole and LayerZero.

To clear the air among top contenders, Uniswap governance did a temperature check, and Wormhole won the race with flying colors grabbing over 60% in favor. In contrast, LayerZero could only get around 30% votes.

However, that’s the only start of the battle. Apparently, the temperature check votes were done off-chain, so not all parties could participate in the voting. Additionally, since neither LayerZero nor Wormhole offer public tokens, their investors (a16z backing LayerZero and Jump backing Wormhole), which are currently in the private market, jumped into the battle to favor their investment.

Since Wormhole bridge has already won the temperature check, A16Z (rooting for LayerZero) immediately rejected the entire Uni to BNB Chain deployment proposal simply because their bridge of choice, LayerZero, lost to Wormhole. Also, this is the first time A16Z voted against an Uniswap proposal and the first time they unloaded the entire 15M UNI vote clip.

As of now, it seems like a lost battle for A16Z and LayerZero. As you can see in the picture attached below, even with A16Z against vote with 15M UNI, there are still over 71.3% votes in favor of the proposal.

Even if this proposal gets passed, it raises some interesting questions about crypto politics and governance and whether A16Z is justified in acting how it did.

This week in Web3 Wednesday:

• FTX is asking politicians who received donations from SBF to return the money
  
• Russia's Sberbank expects to launch its Ethereum-based DeFi platform by May
  
• The year of tokenized ETFs: tokenized S&P500 available for trade on Uniswap
  
• Apparently, BNB is launching an app chain on Cosmos to provide decentralized storage for the existing BNB chain
  

FTX is asking politicians who received donations from SBF to return the money

Sam Bankman-Fried showered politicians with millions of dollars in campaign contributions before his FTX empire imploded in November. Now, the bankrupt crypto exchange wants that money back.

On Sunday, FTX Group said it is sending “confidential letters” to politicians and other political beneficiaries of Bankman-Fried, his deputies, and his companies, asking them to return the money by the end of the month. In a press release, the debtors said they “reserve the right” to try and force repayments – plus interest – through court action.

Russia's Sberbank expects to launch its Ethereum-based DeFi platform by May

According to a Russian news agency Interfax, a platform developed by Sberbank based on the decentralized finance system (DeFi) can be launched before May this year.

This was announced by the director of products of the blockchain laboratory of Sberbank, Konstantin Klimenko. "At the end of April, the platform will be fully open, and then it will be possible to carry out some commercial operations on it," he said.

The year of tokenized ETFs: tokenized S&P500 available for trade on Uniswap

The tokenization of stocks and other traditional assets has long been touted as one of the top use cases for blockchain technology in modern finance, and the trend is starting to pick up steam.

BlackRock's iShares Core S&P 500 ETF($CSPX) has now been turned into a token on the Ethereum network, which can be traded on Uniswap.

According to a report from TrustNodes, the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Backed Finance is responsible for tokenizing shares of the ETF, which is legally classified as a certificate. For every bCSPX created, a share of CSPX is purchased and deposited with Maerki Baumann & Co, a regulated custodian.

Apparently, BNB is launching an app chain on Cosmos to provide decentralized storage for the existing BNB chain

Binance’s blockchain platform, BNB Chain, recently expressed interest in developing a Web3-based storage infrastructure, calling it BNB Greenfield.

According to the whitepaper shared through their official Twitter account, it’s going to be a part of BNB Chain’s decentralized storage infrastructure that gives users and DApps complete control over their data.

Now there’s some murmur on CT about BNB Greenfield being an app chain on Cosmos as it is using both Tendermint / CometBFT and the Cosmos SDK. I’d advise taking this information with a pinch of salt, though.