Uniswap Labs team is vying to grow the exchange’s market share through several new products, says COO Mary-Catherine Lader. Its 24-hour trading volume over the past 24 hours was $1.12 billion just on the Ethereum mainnet. It currently commands 60% of the market, as per DeFi Llama, clearly making it the dominant platform – but only in decentralized finance.
Lader said siphoning off some of that money away from the centralized giants is a top priority for the Uniswap team. The protocol believes leveraging on NFTs is one way to do so. Uniswap Labs bought NFT aggregator Genie in June. Lader said they see NFTs as a growth sector to get more people into crypto and to get more people to swap tokens. She shared that from a market structure perspective, it makes a lot of sense.
Uniswap Labs wants to help create an experience where users can buy and sell any digital asset. Presently, users do that on OpenSea. Lader said users will also be able to buy and sell NFTs on Uniswap from a number of different marketplaces. Uniswap Labs hopes to bring digital asset experience into one place, one-stop. It should be noted that centralized exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken have also jumped into the NFTs bandwagon. Lader outlined that the strategies for growing the protocol’s market share are primarily stewarded by the eponymous Uniswap DAO. It is deliberating to deploy Uniswap on the Ethereum scaler zkSync. UNI token holders, in the past, also voted to implement a trial of the heralded free switch. One notable update has been the vote and the launch of the Uniswap Foundation – a project that funds open-source development in and around the Uniswap protocol.
The Foundation executed its first wave of grants on Wednesday, about $1.8 million across 14 different grants were rolled out across several different projects.
