On Monday, I posted a few thoughts which amounted to my decision to abstain from a voting on which bridge Uniswap should use in its deployment of v3 to BNB.
I want to take the opportunity to expand and point to areas for development where I’m excited to see progress. I also wanted to more explicitly commend Devin and UF for their work in stewarding the process here and on other issues, which in sum, has resulted in a lot more momentum in community governance.
Process-wise, the Uniswap Foundation holding a temperature check on which bridge to use in the BSC deployment served both to generally highlight the issue of bridge selection in cross-chain deployment, and advance the decision in this particular instance. Action begets action, and continued forward movement is critical in decentralized governance.
The discussion around the merits of each bridge being considered here was absolutely better than leaving that discussion unconsidered at all. Was it comprehensive? No. That is why I abstained from voting. Was it forward progress? Yes, and I am glad to see that.
Even more importantly this Snapshot highlighted the need for more bridging research - both on existing solutions for future deployments, and so that a single bridge selection doesn’t need to be bundled to new deployments going forward (for example, as Martin proposes here.) That this came up as a result of this Snapshot is a win in my eyes.
Coming on the back of this Snapshot, the focus moving forward is on improving the cross-chain deployment process from first principles. Encourage folks to follow and contribute to the new Cross-Chain Bridge Assessment discussion as a first step there.
There’s already good discussion emerging around multi-bridge deployment designs, as well as the merits of individual bridges. My view stands that the best outcome is for new chain dapp deployments to be bridge agnostic, and to embrace modular standards that foster more competition. Im looking forward to more forthcoming research / commentary on this topic.
Disclaimer: Variant is an investor in the UNI tokens. Disclosures – Variant