The New King Of DeFi

Uniswap has attracted interests from all around following its governance token issued.

$UNI soared in price shortly after launching, from $1 on Thursday to its peak of $7.37 on Saturday. Major exchanges, among them Coinbase, Binance and Bitfinex, listed the token. But $UNI’s pump wasn’t to last—though, just four days into trading, no conclusions can be drawn about the coin’s fate.

The coin is a riposte to SushiSwap, a clone of Uniswap that launched its own governance token, $SUSHI. Like $UNI, $SUSHI is earned from using the protocol. SushiSwap took business away from Uniswap, so Uniswap minted its own governance token.

So far, the plan has worked. On September 17, the day after launch day, customers had locked in $748 million worth of cryptocurrency in Uniswap’s smart contract, according to DeFi Pulse. Now, $1.93 billion is locked up in its smart contracts. Meanwhile, the amount of crypto locked in SushiSwap has declined, from a peak of $1.42 billion on September 12 to $447 million today.

Despite Uniswap rising to become the leading decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol by total value locked (TVL), its newly issued UNI token price crashed along with many other DeFi tokens.

UNI traded at USD 4.35, having declined 23.35% over the past 24 hours. And despite the token increasing more than 186% from the launch price of USD 3 last Thursday, to a high of USD 8.6 the day after, the early excitement among users now looks to have cooled off.

Moreover, the losses over the last day also positioned UNI as the day’s worst performing token among the top 50 crypto assets by market capitalization, which is currently closely followed by Aave (LEND) and yearn.finance (YFI).

Despite the fact that UNI token has lost nearly 50% of its value from its high last Friday, the Uniswap protocol continues to gain ground in the DeFi sphere. As announced by DeFi Pulse last Friday, the protocol has now secured the position as the leading DeFi protocol by total value locked (TVL), ahead of its competitors Aave and Curve Finance (CRV).

The reshuffling of the DeFi ranking comes as the total value locked (TVL) in the space as a whole reached a new all-time high yesterday of USD 9.77bn. The record follows a correction in the amount of capital locked in DeFi protocols earlier in September, which had seen the TVL fall from USD 9.6bn on September 2, to a low of USD 6.8bn on September 9.

Along with UNI, LEND, CRV, and several other DeFi tokens, however, the Ethereum network’s native token ETH also faced heavy selling today, falling by 8.1% over the past 24 hours to a price of USD 348.