UNI Rises To Top 20 DeFi Token, Defying Predictions Of Price Dump

Uniswap, one of the most popular decentralized exchanges (DEXs), issued out a campaign where it airdropped UNI tokens to past Uniswap users, doing so in batches of 400 per wallet. This move came yesterday, and came without warning. As one would imagine, many analysts suspected that the market would crash.

The initial listing of the UNI tokens was $3 apiece, with 75,235 users that claimed the airdrop, clambering over each other to dump their free coins. Instead of what typically happens, however, UNI has managed to stay stable for the past 12 hours, trading within a range of $2.60 and $3.80. Now, however, the coin is going up, by a spectacular margin, trading at the $5-$6 range at the time of writing

Staggering Spike In TVL

UNI stands as the governance tokens for the Uniswap DEX. Within the first 24 hours of its trading, it already managed to blast into the top 50 rankings for cryptocurrencies by market cap.

DeFi Pulse, a DeFi data provider, made note that Uniswap as a DEX had become the second-largest DeFi protocol, measured by Total Value Locked (TVL). Uniswap represents $1.32 billion in the DeFi industry’s locked funds. In the past 24 hours since the UNI liquidity mining incentives were announced, the TVL of Uniswap had increased by a factor of 75%.

Massive And Sudden Popularity

In a single day’s time, UNI had managed to get listed in more than a dozen exchanges and is featured in just shy of 40 trading pairs. In terms of trading volume, UNI is trading more than $1.8 billion of it. In terms of most-traded crypto assets for the past 24 hours, CoinGecko shows that UNI has managed to take 4th place of all cryptocurrencies, with only ETH, BTC, and USDT being above it.

As it stands now, UNI is being traded for $5.80 at the time of writing. In terms of circulating supply, CoinGecko estimates that a staggering 64,998,333 UNI tokens are changing hands, with a total supply set at 1 billion. Crunching the numbers, this means that UNI’s diluted market cap stands at around $5.78 billion.

A Flash-Hit In The Crypto Space

Coinecko shows that UniSwap stands as the 45th cryptocurrency by market cap, standing just above NXM and just below BUSD.

Not many expected a massive surge in supply to cause a massive surge in price, as well. This could very well be one of the rare cases where the demand was simply too much for the supply, even if the supply was flooded in. It remains to be seen if UNI can manage to remain competitive within the crypto space, but it’s certainly a sight to behold.