From all the defi apps we have seen in the crypto market, Uniswap has kept its dominance and continued to develop and grow. It was the first defi app to bring in users thanks to its simplicity and incentives. Following the FTX collapse and the multiple other collapses centralized entities in 2022, its importance grew even more. In the last period Uniswap seems to be growing and spreading on other ETH L2 chains like Arbitrum, Base etc. It also facing a strong competition from other projects on Solana.
Let’s take a look how is the protocol performing under the current market conditions.
Here we will be looking at:
- Total value locked
- Trading volume
- Top exchanges
- Number of users
- Top Pairs
- Price
The period that we will be looking at is 2020 - 2024.
Total Value Locked
Here is the chart for the TVL on Uniswap starting from September 2020 according to DeFiLama.
Uniswap launched its token back in September 2020, and the liquidity grew fast then. A record high of 10B was reached in April 2021, and again in November 2021. Since then, it has been a downtrend and dropped to 3.5B at the end of 2023.
In 2024 the TVL grew at first reaching 6B in April, then it went sideways for a while and increased again towards the end of the year to 7B. A drop again in the last period and it is now close to 4B.
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.
This is a chart for the daily trading volume. It’s quite volatile.
The daily trading volume has been more constant in the last year, similar to the TVL, with occasional spikes whenever there is some volatility in the market. At times there was more than 5B in daily volume, all legit and recorded on chain with fees paid.
We can see the increase again in the volume in the last period. It has been growing above 1B and reached 2B and 3B in a short period of time.
The monthly trading volume looks like this:
A clearer picture here than the daily volume.
We can see the monthly trading volume reached an ATH at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, when it was around 90B for a few months.
In 2024 the trading volume has increased again and it has reached 80B towards the end of the year. It dropped in the last months, with March close to 50B.
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.
Uniswap ranks in the top 10, although in the last year it was in the top three on occasions, just after Binance and Coinbase, even surpassing Coinbase a few times.
Obviously, the volume on CEXs has increased in the last period and they are ranking better now. The fear from CEXs collapsing has probably been reduced now, more than a year after FTX went down.
There are few more DEXs that are in the top exchanges like Orca on Solana.
Active Users
How many users does Uniswap have? Here is the chart.
This is a chart on a monthly basis.
We can see a massive growth in the last year with October 2024 reaching an absolute ATH for MAUs with more than 18M users. Previously Uniswap had somewhere between 500k to 1M MAUs for a long time. The growth in the number of users is mostly because of the L2 expansion on Uniswap on chains like Arbitrum, Base making the transactions cheap and affordable for the masses.
Most likely there are bots as well.
Top Trading Pairs on Uniswap
Here is the chart for the top trading pairs ranked by liquidity.
The USDC-AETX pair is on the top with close to 350M, followed by WBTC-USDC. In the past the stablecoin to stablecoin pairs were on the top in liquidity like USDC-USDT but obviously these have now moved elsewhere.
Price
The chart for the UNI price looks like this.
The UNI token has been on a wild ride, reaching $40 at some point in 2021. Since then, it has dropped and has been hovering around the $5 mark for a long time. In the first half of 2024 it has increased again to 15 USD at one point and dropped to $6 where we are now.
All the best
@dalz