UNI Shorts Get REKT As it Goes Into Price Discovery While Uniswap TVL Hits a Record $2 Billion

It has been only three days since Uniswap launched its governance token UNI.

The free $1,200 crypto stimulus saw 32k accounts selling their 400 UNI instantly, under $5.

This much activity resulted in ETH gas fees skyrocketing to $11.60, yet again and seeing a level of congestion; the Ethereum network has “never” faced before. The good thing is ETH price also spiked to $392 amidst the ETH balance on exchanges reaching the lowest levels so far this year.

But what these sellers didn’t anticipate was the price discovery the token would go on. Yesterday, UNI hit an all-time high above $8.37, and currently, it is trading at $7.13.

“UNI shorts getting rekt. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of farmers that leverage hedge yields because I do that often, but Jesus this chart looks like someone got rekt, futures were 35% below index and it teleported to the index in a few ticks,” noted trader CL.

These sellers also didn’t take notice of the fact that the decentralized exchange (DEX) handles the same level of volume as the top centralized exchanges such as Coinbase.

“There are VERY few productive assets in crypto space,” said Dovey Wan of Primitive Crypto. “Uniswap Protocol operational efficiency is an order of magnitude higher than Binance and Coinbase.”

Uniswap is currently the dominant force (19.4%) in the DeFi space with a record of $2 billion in TVL, as per DeBank.

This week, the volume on the platform is also gradually growing to over $600 million, which is much more than the likes of Coinbase, Gemini, Poloniex, and Bitfinex.

The token has already been listed on the top cryptocurrency exchanges with futures contracts, providing the opportunity to short or long the crypto asset. DeFi options protocol Opyn also launched the UNI put options.

You can use Uniswap to buy a put option on Uniswap's own token & nobody can stop you. Let that sink in.

Can you even begin to imagine this happening on a centralized exchange?

This is one of those "wow, DeFi is truly amazing" moments for me. https://t.co/J6Gwt3jP6a

— Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) September 18, 2020

“DeFi will devour CeFi, piece by piece. It will be very difficult for proprietary, closed platforms to compete with neutral, open infrastructure,” said Jake Chervinksy, a legal counsel at Compound Finance, about the ongoing development in the DeFi space.