Hi all. Following the community discussion on this proposal over the past week, the UF is posting here to answer some open questions and draw attention to next steps.
Next Steps on the BNB Proposal
- The final Governance vote will move forward with the results of the most recent Snapshot Poll. In other words, no votes voiced outside of the Snapshot poll will be counted in the results. The proposal to deploy Uniswap v3 on BNB Chain will go forward to the final governance vote with Wormhole as the selected bridge.
- Delegates, as always, will have the opportunity to vote for or against the proposal in this final vote, based on their view of which choice is best for Uniswap.
Timeframe and Context on Bridge Selection Temperature Check
- Dec. 11, 2022: The Request for Comment (RFC) to deploy Uniswap v3 on BNB was posted in the Uniswap governance forum. This proposal initially contemplated HyperLoop as the bridge. After initial community discussions, DeBridge and Celer were considered as new options. Ultimately 0xPlasma, the proposer, decided to use Celer as the bridge for its proposal.
- Jan. 16 to Jan. 21: Temperature Check to deploy Uniswap v3 to BNB Chain using Celer as the bridge goes live. It passes with 20M UNI votes in support. At this point, the proposal could have moved forward to the final Governance vote.
- Jan. 20: GFX Labs summarizes its diligence on Celer in a forum post. Celer responds to GFX, and other delegate questions, on Jan. 23 (here) and Jan. 24 (here). This discussion focused on the security setup of Celer. [Note that the Assessment process will diligence Celer, and provide an independent review of its security setup for the community’s benefit]
- Jan. 24: Wormhole posts in the forum.
- Jan. 25: LayerZero posts in the forum.
- Jan. 26: UF proposes an additional Temperature check take place to vote on a bridge for the BNB deployment. This proposal was made in order to 1) allow the BNB proposal to move forward in a timely manner, as the community had expressed its support for a BNB deployment in the initial Temp Check, and 2) to allow for a community review of relevant information on Celer, and to consider other bridge providers discussed in the forum: Wormhole, LayerZero, and deBridge.
- Jan. 27 to Jan. 31: A new Temperature Check is posted on bridge selection.
Cross-Chain Bridge Assessment Process
- As the BNB proposal governance process progressed, we also saw the clear opportunity to create a better process for future cross-chain deployment proposals.
- We have proposed the creation of an Assessment Group for bridges here. Community members will have until at least Friday February 17th to review and provide feedback on the process.
- Applicants to join this team can express their interest in the forum by posting the following: a. Name and affiliation, b. Qualifications as they relate to the criteria stated above, stated briefly, c. Explanation of why you are interested in becoming a member of this team. The exact process by which applicants become team members will be confirmed after community feedback is incorporated over the next 2.5 weeks. In the interim we are excited to hear from interested parties.
- Bridges that wish to be assessed may also post their responses to the questions listed in the forum until at least that date.
Clarity on deploying cross-chain with no bridge, and changing the bridge used for a chain
- Upon deployment to X chain, the “owner” of the Uniswap v3 factory contract on that chain is set to a bridge contract which receives and relays messages from the Ethereum L1 timelock contract.
- It is technically possible to deploy Uniswap v3 without a bridge on X chain. However, an implication of that decision is that no future information can be communicated to that deployment by Uniswap governance. Uniswap governance would not be able to turn on the fee switch on X chain or “add” a bridge later on. No fee tiers could be added, unless the deployment includes an affordance for anyone to be able to add any fee tier.
- If a deployment of Uniswap v3 to X chain is made with bridge A chosen, it is possible for Uniswap to later update the bridge to bridge B. This decision would go through the governance process. The final governance vote calldata would be sent from the Ethereum L1 timelock to the X chain deployment through bridge A, and would communicate a change of the Uniswap v3 factory owner from bridge contract A to bridge contract B.
General Comments
- This proposal has received more attention than any Uniswap proposal in recent memory. It has drawn widespread attention to the role that bridges play in governance, and begun to inform a larger audience about the tradeoffs in and intricacies of bridge design. Delegates had the opportunity to speak directly to bridge teams to learn from them and ask questions.
- The discussion also highlighted the urgent need for a better process to be implemented for bridge selection. We mentioned this above, and are excited to receive your feedback and move this forward.
- It also highlighted the need for more extensive research into bridges for governance, and into bridge-agnostic solutions for protocols. The Uniswap and broader crypto community mobilized themselves to do considerable work in this area in a short period of time. Kydo proposed a Multi Message Aggregation method. Celer designed, deployed, and has already conducted tests for a multi-bridge implementation for Uniswap governance. Martin Koppelmann (Co-founder and CEO of Gnosis) proposed a general bridge framework that may operate independent of, and provide more security than, any single team or approach. This work would not have materialized over such a short time frame without the fervent community discussion here. These solutions, and more, will be processed and assessed by the Bridge Assessment team for future usage by Uniswap governance.
- Uniswap is one of the largest DeFi communities on Ethereum to pursue cross-chain deployments, and is having these difficult but important conversations in public. We hope our learnings, and the new process we create from here, will contribute to the creation of more seamless, standard processes and technological solutions that other protocols can benefit from as they consider deploying across other chains.
- While the focus on and fervor of the discussion was not anticipated by many in the community, including the UF, we believe the developments above are a net positive for Uniswap, and the space as a whole.