The DeFi sector has been quiet as of late, with the exception of last week, which saw major growth for DeFi tokens such as Aave (AAVE) and Chainlink (LINK). While news of DeFi cult favourites such as Uniswap, Yearn.Finance, Sushiswap, Yam.Finance and more popped up frequently over last summer, the hype was short-lived, and most projects laid dormant for the last quarter of the year.
Against this backdrop, Uniswap (UNI) gained 75% this week to reach a new high of $15.50 six hours ago today in a spectacular price surge, according to CoinMarketCap. The UNI token was well on its way to breaking its previous records early this month as its price doubled on January 12, marking the start of what may end up being another good season for DeFi tokens this year.
Uniswap has risen to second place on the Top DeFi Rankings list, surpassing popular token AAVE as it now is second only to LINK.
While UNI’s growth is not sufficient evidence to prove that DeFi is making a full comeback, DeFi tokens have gained much support these two weeks as Bitcoin continues to decline after weeks of consecutive new highs. Innovation continues in the DeFi sector as projects remain focused on pushing out new reward models and making further improvements to engage their community better with the promise of governance.
Uniswap seems to have both in spades – it continues to see an influx of new entrants and also manages to retain its current users because unlike its competitors, Uniswap does not extract fees from its liquidity pool, having moved away from value accrual and the distribution of “dividends” to its users, according to Ryan Watkins, a researcher at Messari Crypto.
“This industry’s obsession with dividends is a backlash to the useless utility tokens from 2017. Yes it’s important for tokens to have the potential to accrue value,” he points out via a tweet, “But earnings potential is not the same as dividends.”
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