$2B Locked: Uniswap Now Bigger Than Entire DeFi Industry Just Two Months Ago

Sebastian Sinclair and Paddy Baker
Updated ·2-min read

Uniswap is now bigger than the entire decentralized finance (DeFi) space was just two months ago, as the trading protocol becomes the first to pass the $2 billion milestone in total value locked (TVL).

  • Uniswap clocked the record figure just after midnight (UTC) Monday and currently has $2.06 billion worth of crypto assets locked in, according to DeFi Pulse.

  • Testament to its neck-breaking growth, there’s now more value just in Uniswap than there was in the entire DeFi space on July 9.

  • As of press time, there’s now more than $11 billion in TVL in DeFi, with Uniswap making up approximately 18% of that.

  • The Ethereum-based Uniswap utilizes an automated market-making system leveraging liquidity pools so users can exchange or “swap” between ether (ETH) and any ERC-20 token.

  • Holders are incentivized to deposit tokens in these liquidity pools with interest and a cut of the swap fee – the total balance in these pools together make up Uniswap’s $2 billion TVL.

  • Monday’s news shows just how much Uniswap’s fortunes have changed in the past few weeks.

  • Back in early September, $830 million worth of vital liquidity moved to rival protocol SushiSwap, causing Uniswap’s TVL to plunge to just $400 million by Sept. 10. (It should be noted, however, it wasn’t a zero-sum game: Uniswap’s TVL had been $230 million before the SushiSwap saga began.)

  • A week later, in order to coax users back, Uniswap launched its own native UNI token and airdropped over $500 million to wallet addresses who had been using the protocol since before September.

  • UNI has led users to quickly snap back to Uniswap and its TVL was approximately $1.8 billion just days after the token launched.

  • The platform plans to issue and distribute 4 billion UNI tokens to the community over the next four years.

  • The next biggest DeFi project, peer-to-peer lending platform Maker, trails slightly behind Uniswap at $1.96 billion TVL, according to DeFi Pulse.

See also: Stablecoins Hit $20B Milestone, a Nearly 300% Year-to-Date Surge

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