Uniswap’s governance token, UNI, has defied the market-wide sell-off, posting a 25% weekly gain and a 10%+ gain after the launch of Unichain, its own layer-2 network. The token’s price has surged 15% in a single day, with its trading volume increasing by 418% to $583.2 million. This significant growth has propelled UNI to the 20th position on the CoinMarketCap ranking, with a market capitalization of $5 billion.
The launch of Unichain, an application-specific layer-2 blockchain network, has been the driving force behind UNI’s impressive performance. Uniswap Labs, the company behind Uniswap, designed Unichain to deliver faster and cheaper transactions, as well as enhanced interoperability across blockchain networks. The app chain will initially feature 1-second block times, with plans to eventually reduce block times to less than 250 milliseconds.
Unichain is built on Optimism’s Superchain, which will enable traders to access liquidity from other L2 networks, including Coinbase’s layer-2 Base and Synthetix’s SNAXchain. The launch of Unichain has generated significant interest in the Uniswap ecosystem, with the number of daily transactions increasing by 1,582% and the number of active addresses jumping by 587%.
The rally has also seen Uniswap become one of the most liquidated tokens in the last 12 hours, with over $1.5 million leveraged UNI positions being liquidated. The majority of these liquidations were short UNI positions, totaling $1.2 million.
The launch of Unichain is a significant development for Uniswap, and the subsequent growth in UNI’s price and trading volume is a testament to the excitement surrounding the project. As the Uniswap ecosystem continues to grow and develop, it will be interesting to see how UNI’s price and adoption evolve in the coming weeks and months.