This Thursday, DeFi "big brother" Uniswap announced the launch of the governance token UNI, and at the same time airdropped 15% of the total amount of tokens to users who have traded or provided liquidity in Uniswap before September 1st. Every old user 400 UNI will be airdropped.

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(Screenshot from coinmarketcap)

Immediately, the excited miners exploded in the community.

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"The strongest candy in history" UNI

As early as early August, a document from the US Securities Regulatory Commission (SEC) showed that Uniswap’s development company had received US$11 million in financing in early June (but it was not confirmed whether it was the total financing amount of this round of Uniswap). This round of financing was led by a16z, with participation from USV, Paradigm, and Version.

At that time, the community had expectations of "issuing coins" and "doing things" for Uniswap, which had received financing.

On September 17, the news was settled. It was officially announced that Uniswap’s governance token UNI was created with a quantity of 1 billion. The platform allocated 60% of UNI’s initial supply to Uniswap community members, of which a quarter (accounting for 15% of the total supply) has been allocated to previous users . After the airdrop, each participating address can obtain 400 UNI, and the highest value of these Tokens once reached 1,800 US dollars.

"Equivalent to sending a small 10,000 yuan to each address," commented an investor.

The news quickly spread "viral" in the community.

In addition to issuing UNI tokens, Uniswap also announced that it will soon start liquidity mining. According to Uniswap’s announcement, UNI’s initial liquidity mining plan will start at 20:00 on September 18 (Beijing time). The four fund pools on Uniswap v2 are ETH/USDT, ETH/USDC, ETH/DAI, and ETH/WBTC. Can participate in UNI mining. Among them, each fund pool will allocate 5 million tokens to liquidity providers, which means that 83333 UNI will be allocated to each fund pool every day. The initial liquidity mining program will run until November 17th.

The exchanges responded quickly to Uniswap's currency issuance operation. In just a few hours, UNI was registered on the three major exchanges of Binance, Huobi, and OKEx, and related contract transactions were also quickly opened. At the same time, Coinbase officially announced that it will start accepting Uniswap (UNI) deposits, and transactions will be opened if the liquidity is satisfied.

Competed by the "Big Four", the popularity of UNI is self-evident. Some of these exchanges have also actively launched activities related to UNI deposits: OK to share USDT with no transaction fees, matcha to share 1.5 W Sushi, etc.

The most excited are the old Uniswap users and Ethereum miners. In the community, the number of old users holding multiple Uniswap addresses is not small, and examples of "getting rich overnight" due to this "windfall" are widely spread in the community.

"Those who issued counterfeit coins made a fortune, and those who provided liquidity also made a fortune. These people often have many addresses, and according to the rules, they will only be sent according to the address. Estimated at the beginning (airdrop) price, each address will send 4 10,000 RMB, 10 (addresses) is 400,000.” A miner with the pseudonym “Niu Dao” analyzed.

"This is really the third wave of DeFi mining. UNI is the absolute leader of the decentralized trading platform, the leader of the leaders," he spoke highly of.

Judging from the current data, the trading volume of decentralized exchanges is constantly rising, of which Uniswap has the largest market share. As of September 17, the total value of Uniswap locked positions was 932 million US dollars, second only to Curve with 1.054 billion US dollars, and the price of UNI was 3.6 US dollars.

Uniswap's process of exploring governance is indeed worth thinking about. As officially described, in less than two years since its launch, the Uniswap protocol has achieved a transaction volume of more than 20 billion U.S. dollars, supports 2,484 encrypted asset transactions, more than 250,000 addresses, and more than 49,000 liquidity providers (LP ) obtained more than $1 billion in liquidity and earned $56 million in fees.

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Liquidity mining "survival"?

This Uniswap operation seems to be interpreted as a timely rain in the DeFi field.

Can this enthusiasm continue the popularity of DeFi? How long can it last?

This is also a topic that investors have been paying attention to.

In fact, the experience of Sushiswap, another decentralized trading platform at the center of public opinion, was not pleasant. A few weeks ago, Chef Nomi, an anonymous core developer of Sushiswap, suddenly converted his millions of SUSHI tokens into ETH, which caused a sharp drop in the overall liquidity of Sushiswap instantly. As the founder, this kind of behavior makes it very difficult for the outside world to understand, which also brings a lot of negative information to Sushiswap. For many DeFi projects, this approach has created an unhealable wound on the project itself, which has damaged one of the most core concepts of the crypto community: confidence.

Subsequently, neither the successful migration nor the repurchase announcement could make Sushiswap continue its glory, and the market sentiment dropped for a while.

Under such circumstances, many people believe that the future development of the DeFi concept is not optimistic. Just a few days ago, an investor reflected in the community: "Judging from the DeFi mining that is currently participating, the current income of liquidity mining has dropped significantly, and the stamina is insufficient. If there is no new way to play If it comes out, this wave of craze is almost over.”

And Uniswap's move to issue coins has made many people lament once again that the popularity of DeFi has finally returned. Positive voices came from the community:

"The first day released so much today, (UNI) actually withstood the pressure, probably a demon coin."

"Ether may have a wave of gains, pledge Ether to mine UNI."

"In short, digging, lifting, and selling are never wrong."

Investors who are optimistic about Uniswap believe that among decentralized trading platforms, Uniswap’s current influence on end users is unmatched by other platforms. Real user transaction data can measure whether a Dex can achieve long-term sustainable development. At this point, other liquidity mining projects have not shaken the foundation of uniswap.

Wang Feng, the founder of Mars Finance, publicly stated: "The DeFi curtain has just opened. Compared with today, the future will be more than ten times and a hundred times. Is there no second half?"

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The Controversial "Post-DeFi Era"

According to Blocklike's observations, in the current stage known as the "post-DeFi era". Many investment institutions still have different views on the development of DeFi.

Another investment institution told Blocklike: "Actually, for a large number of investors, 400 UNI may only be equivalent to reimbursement of GAS fees. Here, the 80/20 rule still applies."

At the same time, he also said: "At present, some investment institutions have suspended their exploration of the direction of DeFi. It still takes time to observe whether the market can see a market rotation."

In the community, voices that are not optimistic about the follow-up development of DeFi call Uniswap’s currency issuance a “sao operation”, and believe that Uniswap’s issuance of currency at this point in time may have predicted that the DeFi bubble will be serious, before the market temperature drops , to speed up the currency issuance. At the same time, major exchanges have launched mining products in the current market, and many projects have survived under the guise of DeFi. The current market may have entered the stupid stage.

Jennifer from Oneswap commented on Uniswap in an interview: "I think of a more popular explanation, which is probably the village demolition dividends. Many friends in the circle feel that it is a windfall. Unexpected."

According to his point of view, Uniswap’s issuance of governance tokens can be regarded as an upgrade method, which can quickly regain the previously lost funds. At the same time, this is also a feedback to the early participants and community of Uniswap, which is worth learning from many projects. The highest level of community governance is: the project party can develop and grow with the help of the community, and the community can also share the dividends brought by the success of the project.

"The current price of UNI is also rising. Several major exchanges are scrambling to go online, and even broke the record of Coinbase's fastest listing. In the words of the circle, the online is the peak. But it should be noted that the number of tokens airdropped is as high as 1.5 100 million, the initial liquid market may be a little bit of pressure. Therefore, the investment risk in the secondary market is still a bit high, and it is not recommended to buy in the secondary market now,” he suggested.

In the community, we can see that in the face of the sudden large amount of candy UNI, many people sighed: "Money is not earned, it is all blown by the wind."

However, it should be noted that just because it was "blown by the strong wind", the investor's funds are also very likely to be "blown away by the strong wind".