Curriculum·J308 Governance, DAOs, and Airdrop Economics·about 31 min
Participating well
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Compute your actual influence, directly and through delegation
- →Identify the proposer's interest before evaluating any proposal
- →Run the five checks that separate reading a proposal from reading its summary
- →Decide between voting, delegating and abstaining on stated grounds
Junior · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with The Uniswap BNB deployment vote, February 2023.
- What happened
- Uniswap governance considered deploying version three to BNB Chain, which required selecting a bridge. An earlier vote had chosen Wormhole over LayerZero by 28 million votes to 17 million. On 5 February 2023 Andreessen Horowitz voted its 15 million UNI against the final deployment proposal, forming the largest single bloc among roughly 36 million votes cast at the time, citing Wormhole's 2022 breach as a security concern. A partner had previously indicated the firm favored LayerZero, which is one of its portfolio companies, and the firm stated that it would have voted its 15 million tokens toward LayerZero had it been technically able to. The proposal passed and the deployment proceeded with Wormhole. Reporting subsequently noted that a16z had delegated voting power to a group that opposed its own position.
- The decision point
- Every element of this was visible. The holding was public, the position was stated, the conflict was disclosed, and the vote was on-chain. And a single holder still represented 41.7 percent of the votes cast on a major protocol's decision, which meant the rest of the electorate had to reach a supermajority among themselves to carry it. They did, which is the part worth noting: the concentration was real, the disclosure was real, and the outcome went the other way.
What you will be able to answer
- →How concentrated was the vote?
- →What is your actual influence?
- →What are the five proposal checks?
- →What did the outcome demonstrate?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/02/10/uniswap-vote-on-bnb-deployment-ends-with-silicon-valleys-a16z-on-losing-side
- https://cryptoslate.com/a16z-15m-bloc-vote-against-uniswap-bnb-chain-deployment-raises-decentralization-concerns/
- https://www.theblock.co/post/208729/a16z-votes-against-proposal-to-deploy-latest-uniswap-iteration-on-bnb-chain
- https://blockworks.co/news/a16z-delegated-to-group-that-opposed-its-vote-on-uniswap-for-bnb-chain
Confidence high·Volatility medium·Reviewed 2026-08-06·Owner unassigned
Contested
Whether the firm's stated security objection to Wormhole was the operative reason, or whether the portfolio interest in LayerZero was, is not established and this lesson does not assert either. Both the objection and the interest were publicly stated by the firm, which is the fact the lesson uses.
This lesson deliberately ends on a case where concentration did not determine the outcome. Per P6 the opposite result is common and the lesson would be dishonest if it presented this one as typical rather than as the boundary case that shows what engagement can do.