According to PANews, a significant UNI token holder has raised concerns about Uniswap's decentralization and behind-the-scenes dealings. The holder, Billy Gao, who is the governance lead at Stanford Blockchain Club and a representative for thousands of UNI governance token holders, published a 22-post critique. Gao questioned Uniswap's sudden decision to launch its own blockchain, the cancellation of a proposed fee switch mechanism that could benefit UNI holders, and the bypassing of the DAO that ostensibly governs Uniswap.

Gao expressed that the hasty launch of Unichain took many by surprise and left representatives uninformed. He noted that this decision fundamentally altered the UNI ERC-20 contract, which is now tied to a new blockchain. Gao questioned the actual control token holders have, stating, 'What control do token holders really have?' He also suspected financial motives behind Uniswap's actions, particularly the choice to support Unichain with the Optimism (OP) stack. Although Gao did not make formal accusations, he suggested there must be reasons behind adopting the OP stack and questioned why everyone should trust that there were no behind-the-scenes deals.

On October 10, Uniswap developers announced the launch of Unichain, a Layer 2 network built using Optimism technology.