De/Centralized Uniswap

GM Readers!📪 It's BitDegree Insider, and it's time to greet this Monday.

⭐️Today's selection:

🤔De/Centralized Uniswap?
🤜Crypto Flash Mob
💰Venture Mondays
👌Selected Meme of The Day
📰Bite-Sized News

DE/CENTRALIZED UNISWAP?

There's a heated debate taking place right now. Something odd happened with Uniswap, the decentralized exchange.

Some people are saying that instead of 'decentralized', Uniswap should be called 'controlled'. What's up?

Let's start from the beginning: Last month, the Uniswap community was asked to evaluate the idea of integrating the BNB chain into Uniswap.

80.28% of participants were in favour.

Uniswap now has $3.95bn worth of funds locked up. Here's how the Chain Breakdown looks like:

Ethereum - $3.66bn
Polygon - $111.3m
Arbitrum - $109.93m
Optimism - $70.15m
Celo - $1.32m

If the BNB Chain was integrated, Uniswap's Total Value Locked (TVL) would increase by more than $1 billion. This ain't no pocket money.

Uniswap became the first-ever app on the Ethereum network that managed to generate more than a billion dollars in revenue in one year.

Admittedly, that was between October 2020 and October 2021, when the market was growing.

So, it looked like the community was looking forward to greeting the BNB Chain. But then...

A16z, a venture capital company, had something different to say.

They used their UNI token holdings to vote against the proposal. The company owns a large number of coins - 41.5M $UNI (4.15% of the total supply).

What's the reason for it?

The integration was supposed to happen by using the Wormhole Bridge. A16z doesn't like that. They've invested in LayerZero bridge. They want to see that being used for the integration.

"To be completely unambiguous, we at a16z would vote 15 million tokens in favour of LayerZero if we had the technical capability. And we will be able to vote for snapshots in the future," a spokesperson commented.

Jump Crypto, another prominent crypto investment firm, also holds a huge amount of $UNI tokens and they have not yet announced their decision.

Jump Crypto have invested in Wormhole Bridge, so they are likely to vote for integration.

What's interesting is that previously, a16z had no objection to the implementation of Polygon, Celo and zkSync networks to Uniswap. Something's changed.

Nevertheless, as the situation progresses, it looks like the integration of the BNB Chain will eventually happen. You can see from the chart below that the no-sayers are outnumbered.

Other major token holders (ConsenSys, Gauntlet, etc.) also have yet to have their say. The voting will end on the 10th of February.

TL;DR: Uniswap's community voted in favor of integrating BNB Chain into Uniswap. A16z, a venture capital firm, sabotaged the vote because, as a holder of a significant amount of $UNI tokens, their vote was very influential, and they did not want that to happen.

CRYPTO FLASH MOB

Crypto Twitter were up for a surprise.

More than 10 DeFi Protocols including MakerDAO, SushiSwap and Balancer simultaneously posted images of "fist bumps" with different background colours.

No one's sure about what's going on. For example, Gearbox Protocol said it's just a flash mob to cheer up Crypto Twitter.

But the community expects to hear a more official announcement any time soon.

The fun part is that, of course, this event created confusion. And other crypto projects felt like joining in, despite not knowing what on Earth is going on.

Alright... Here we go as well:

Many observers started guessing that this fist-bump-thing could signal an upcoming $ARBI airdrop or partnership.

What's that? Arbitrum is a Layer2 solution on top of Ethereum for fast and cheap transactions. And they're expected to organize an airdrop soonish.

Arbitrum token is not yet launched, so many people are still building theories about when will that day come, since they need to compete with different L2 blockchains for an audience, and token release would make sense.

Apparently, The Arbitrum team will be giving a presentation titled "When Token & the Arbitrum Ecosystem" this week. So maybe it checks out?

TL;DR: Suddenly, more than 10 DeFi Protocols including MakerDAO, SushiSwap and Balancer simultaneously posted images of "fist bumps". People started guessing this could mean an upcoming airdrop.

VENTURE MONDAYS

'Mon' in 'Monday' stands for 'Money'. Here are the last week's winners.

Blockchain security firm Sec3 raised $10M in a seed funding round led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Sanctor Capital and Essence VC.

Sec3 is providing security launch audits and automated solutions for Web3 projects to ensure protocols stay safe as they scale.

Gabee Town, a web3 Game Platform by YGG Japan raised $2.95M in a private funding round.

There are big investors among participants: SQUARE ENIX, SEGA, GREE, MARBLEX, Coincheck, Gate io Labs, Infinity Ventures Crypto (IVC) and others.

NFT index and algorithmic lending protocol Fungify raised $6M in a funding round led by CitizenX, with participation from Distributed Global, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Taureon Capital, Anagram, Flow Ventures and others.

Fungify is building a new NFT lending platform. Having learned from the mistakes of other NFT lending platforms that have failed, they're promising a superior platform with such features as instant NFT loans, (both legible and market-driven) being available from the very start.

SELECTED MEME OF THE DAY