Uniswap and Curve has been the two major defi apps. Both initially started on Ethereum and then spread to other chains, but with the majority of the liquidity still on ETH.
Let’s compare these two and see how they are doing once they are aligned next to each other.
Here we will be looking at:
- Total value locked
- Trading Volume
- Uniswap V2 VS V3 in trading volume
- Number of users
- Top Pairs
- Marketcap
The period that we will be looking at is 2022 - 2023.
Total Value Locked
Here is the chart.
As we can see Curve was leading here by a lot at the beginning of 2022. At the time Curve had around 24B in TVL, while Uniswap was just around 8B. Three times more TVL on Curve.
But then in May 2022, the collapse of UST happened, and we can see a sharp drop in the TVL on Curve from 18B to 9B just in a period of few days. Obviously, UST hit the stablecoins a lot, and especially the pools on Curve.
From the summer of 2022 these two are quite close in TVL value, with Curve leading with a small margin. In November we can notice another drop in the TVL, and again Curve dropped by more. The TVL on both apps reached lows at 3B.
In the last months there is an increase in the TVL again and we are now at 4B in TVL for Uniswap and 5B for Curve.
Trading Volume
Trading volume is extremely important. That is where the fees come from and the APR for liquidity providers. No trading volume means no fees and no capital in the protocol.
The chart for the trading volume looks like this.
We can see a lot of volatility when it comes to the trading volume.
Uniswap is oscillating a lot, while Curve has some volatility when there are major moves in the market.
In the last year Uniswap had trading volume more than 5B on few occasions, while Curve was mostly under 1B for the whole year, just with few spikes.
In the last months the trading volume has increased again, especially on Uniswap, reaching 1.5B. On Curve the trading volume has been around 200M daily.
Uniswap is leading by a lot in terms of trading volume.
The monthly chart looks like this:
Here again we can see the lead of Uniswap. In the last month, January 2023, there was 28B trading volume on Uniswap, vs 8B on Curve. While the difference is still big, in the last year January 2022, the numbers were 90B to 10B, that is much higher then what we have now, meaning Curve has closed the gap a bit.
DEX VS CEX Volume
If we take a look at the data for the trading volume on the other exchanges provided by some of the aggregators like coingecko the numbers looks like this.
An example for 24 hours:
Uniswap ranks on the 3th spot, just behind the two big boys Binance and Coinbase. Curve is down on the ranking, but it is still managing to enter in the top exchanges list.
Obviously Uniswap is a bigger competitor to the big CEX than Curve. Curve is having its niche in the stablecoins arena.
Active Users
How many users Uniswap has? Here is the chart.
In terms of users Uniswap is leading by a lot. Curve is barely visible on the chart, with the yellow line close to the x axis.
Uniswap now has around 50k DAUs, while Curve is in the range of few hundreds. Seems like Curve is more of an industry liquidity provider, not a regular users one.
On a monthly basis the chart looks like this:
The month chart tells similar story. A big lead for Uniswap. 400k users in January 2023 for Uniswap and only around 3k for Curve.
Top Trading Pairs on Uniswap
Here is the chart for the top trading pairs ranked by liquidity.
In terms of top pairs, Curve is leading with its staked ETH, stETH pool. A 1.7B in the ETH-stETH pool on the Curve pool now. Obviously staking ETH is an attractive thing now, and a lot of users and whales are taking advantage of it. On Uniswap the number one pool is the USDC-ETH with 500M.
Interesting the FRAX pool is on the second spot on Curve with 530M, while on Uniswap the DAI-USDC pool.
Overall as we can see from the chart, the Curve pools are bigger than Uniswap, that is understandable because Curve has overall higher TVL than Uniswap.
Market cap
When we compare the market cap for these two apps, we get this:
UNI is leading by a lot in the whole period. In the last period UNI is around 5B in market cap, while Curve is almost at 1B. A 5 to 1 ratio.
In summary Uniswap is obviously is leading by most of the metrics, trading volume, users, market cap, but Curve is leading on the TVL side. Stablecoins can attract a lot of capital obviously, but its interesting that staked ETH is also a major pool on Curve now, that has by far the highest TVL. Since stETH is a derivative of ETH, this pool is similar to USD pools, and Curve has provided the highest liquidity for trading these two assets, stETH-ETH.
All the best
@dalz