UNI, the governance token of the Uniswap decentralized exchange, outperformed the cryptocurrency market on October 10, posting a 15% daily rise following the launch of its own layer 2 network, Unichain. UNI price is up 25% over the past week and 23% over the past 30 days.
UNI/USD daily chart. Source: TradingView
UNI’s trading volume increased 418% on the day to $583.2 million. UNI, with a market capitalization of $5 billion, ranks 20th in the CoinMarketCap rankings.
This achievement comes after Uniswap Labs announced the launch of Unichain, an application-specific layer 2 blockchain network.
Uniswap Labs said Unichain is designed to deliver faster, cheaper transactions and improved interoperability across blockchain networks.
source: Uniswap Lab
App Chain will initially feature a blocking time of 1 second, with plans to eventually reduce the blocking time to less than 250 milliseconds.
“Unichain will launch with block times of 1 second and will soon introduce 250ms “subblocks” that will make the user experience feel immediate.”
Built on top of Optimism’s Superchain, Unichain allows traders to access liquidity from other L2 networks on the superchain, including Coinbase Layer-2 Base and Synthentix’s SNAXchain.
relevant: Uniswap launches its own layer 2, Unichain
Following this offer, the price of UNI jumped more than 17% from $7.20 at the open, reaching an intraday high of $8.46 on October 10, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.
The rally made Uniswap one of the most liquidated tokens in the past 12 hours, according to CoinGlass data. The figure below shows that over $1.5 million of leveraged UNI positions were liquidated in the last 12 hours, with $1.2 million comprising short-term UNI liquidation.
Cryptocurrency liquidation heatmap. Source: Coinglass
Additional data from market intelligence firm CryptoQuant showed an increase in network activity on Uniswap. According to the chart below, the number of daily transactions jumped 1,582% from a low of 40 on October 9 to a high of 673 on October 10.
Uniswap transaction count. Source: CryptoQuant
During the same period, the number of active addresses also increased by 587%. This means increased adoption of the Uniswap ecosystem, increasing demand for UNI tokens.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. All investment and trading activities involve risk and readers should conduct their own research when making any decisions.