- Uniswap delegates are voting to deploy Uniswap on multiple blockchains.
- Launching v2 is expected to starve any copycats currently deployed on these chains.
- The vote is a final onchain execution poll after months of delay.
After almost three years since its launch, Uniswap is going multichain – again.
That’s according to an ongoing onchain vote among community members to deploy Uniswap v2 on every blockchain that already hosts its more recent v3 protocol, including Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base.
Participants have already shown unanimous support, with 10 million UNI tokens cast in favour of the proposal.
The proposal has yet to satisfy Uniswap DAO’s 40 million UNI tokens quorum requirement — the minimum number of DAO votes necessary for a vote to be viable. Failure to meet the quorum means the vote wouldn’t pass regardless of results and be restarted.
The polls shut on Saturday.
Erin Koen, governance lead at Uniswap Foundation and the proposal’s author, said the absence of Uniswap v2 on some blockchains allowed unsafe copycats to thrive. Deployment would instead help to divert liquidity back to Uniswap.
He added that having both Uniswap versions on these blockchains would help provide better execution for small token swaps.
While Uniswap v3 has been deployed on multiple chains, Uniswap v2 has exclusively been on Ethereum since its launch in May 2021, amassing a market size of $1.9 billion. It has also processed $465 billion in token swaps to date.
As a standalone version, Uniswap v2 is only behind Curve and Uniswap v3 in terms of market size for decentralised exchanges.
Delegates voted in August to approve the plan, but that was an offchain temperature check — a preliminary vote among DAO delegates to gauge whether they agree with a proposal.
The current onchain vote, if passed, would execute the plan.
Across the Uniswap aisle
Some Uniswap community members have previously been critical of the plan.
One DAO member with the pseudonym kfx previously said the move was coming too late and should have happened in 2021 to preempt the emergence of harmful copycats.
Kfx also previously warned that deploying Uniswap v2 to blockchains that already have the protocol’s latest upgrade could cause liquidity fragmentation. Crypto liquidity for trading is spread too thinly across different protocols, they argued.
However, supporters like GFX Labs, a crypto research firm, say the move could help the protocol acquire even more market share. Their response to delegates critical of the plan has been “better late than never.”
Despite enthusiasm for the plan, the process hasn’t been hitch-free. The onchain vote, slated for October after the successful temperature check, was postponed.
Koen noted on the community forum at that time that the process ran into a “nit picky issue.”
This “issue” involved a lack of uniformity in the smart contract codes being used by the deploying teams to launch Uniswap v2 on the various blockchains.
This has now been resolved, Koen said.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. To share tips or information about stories, please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.
