Uniswap's Weekly Trading Volume Crosses $10B As UNI Token Rallies

Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange in the crypto space, boasted record weekly trading volumes of $10 billion.

@Uniswap weekly trading volume just passed $10b for the first time!!!

👀 $10b/week is over $0.5 trillion per year pic.twitter.com/ZibcDT9Zob

— Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams) April 20, 2021

What Happened: The protocol’s native token UNI was trading at an all-time high of $36.03 at the time of writing, gaining over 15.00% overnight after seeing a 181% increase in 24-hour trading volumes.

Uniswap has managed to remain the market leader among decentralized exchanges (DEXs), despite the fact that token swaps on the DEX come at a significantly higher cost.

Since Uniswap is built on Ethereum ETH/USD, users are subject to high transaction costs ranging between $55 to $72.

This has given competitor DEXs like PancakeSwap and Mdex an advantage.

Why It Matters: According to data from CoinGecko, Uniswap’s 24-hour trading volume stood at $2.9 billion, while PancakeSwap reported volumes in excess of $3.5 billion for the same period.

There is good news around the corner for Uniswap, which comes in the form of Uniswap v3, which will go live on May 5.

A part of the solution is Optimism, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum.

Optimism is scheduled to be deployed later this year, resulting in those transaction costs coming down by a significant amount.

See also: How to Buy Uniswap (UNI)

According to an announcement from the team, Uniswap v3 contracts have already been deployed to all the major Ethereum testnets.