Uniswap Tops Maker as ETH Locked Approaches 3 Million

Uniswap is making new milestones this week as it has surpassed Maker in terms of Ethereum collateral, and has become the first DeFi protocol to reach $2 billion in liquidity.

The Uniswap decentralized exchange has come a long way this year. Since the beginning of 2020 it has grown by a whopping 16500% in terms of collateral lockup and now it has more Ethereum liquidity than DeFi stalwart MakerDAO.

ETH on Uniswap Surges

The milestone was noted in a reply to founder Hayden Adams who retweeted the $2 billion level getting hit. Uniswap is back at the top of the DeFi tree following a minor daily increase in collateral.

Congratulations! @UniswapProtocol also passed @MakerDAO in the ETH locked category, which I always view as the most important.

The race is on! ???? pic.twitter.com/JLJth86fLU

— mariano.eth (@nanexcool) September 28, 2020

In terms of Ethereum, Uniswap now holds 2.9 million ETH, or 2.6% of the entire circulating supply. This has been enough to enable the DEX to flip Maker which currently has 2.8 million ETH locked up.

The feat has been achieved following the launch of four ETH based liquidity pools and its native UNI token. At the time of writing over $1.6 billion has been locked into these four pools and at a 50:50 collateral ratio represents over $800 million in ETH.

Maker does not offer the same yield farming incentives which is why liquidity providers have flocked to Uniswap over the past week. UNI farming will continue until November 17 and it is likely that this liquidity will then be moved on to greater yielding opportunities.

Uniswap TVL Tops $2 Billion

Uniswap has also become the first DeFi protocol to top $2 billion TVL according to data on Defipulse.com. Its own Uniswap.info analytics dashboard reports liquidity on the platform at a record $2.29 billion.

Again, this has enabled Uniswap to retake the top spot in terms of DeFi TVL, usurping Maker which has $1.95 billion.

The other two billion dollar DeFi protocols are Aave and Curve Finance, with wBTC not far behind at $950 million.

Uniswap’s native UNI token has remained consolidating over the past couple of days and is currently trading down 5% on the day at $4.70. Rival DeFi governance and LP tokens such as SUSHI have dumped over 80% this month whereas UNI appears to have held most of its gains so far despite the initial selloff.

Volumes have dwindled since the big airdrop but slow accumulation is still occurring via those four ETH liquidity pools. There are still seven weeks of farming to go before UNI rewards, currently being distributed at 83,333 tokens per pool per day, are exhausted.