Uniswap has launched its own governance token, UNI, most likely to combat the development of Sushi Swap.
Since the end of August, there has been a real fight between the two protocols, following the release of SushiSwap on the market to compete with Uniswap.
To date, according to defipulse.com, Uniswap has returned to having more funds locked than its rival.
Until the launch day of the SushiSwap project on August 28th, 2020, Uniswap had never exceeded $300 million in total value locked (TVL).
By the time the launch of the rival project, and especially the migration, was announced, its TVL had risen to a considerable $1.8 billion on September 5th.
But on September 10th, when the migration started, it plummeted to 400 million, only to recover and stabilize in the last few days at around 800 million.
Sushiswap’s TVL on September 10th, on the other hand, rose from zero to 1.1 billion in a single day, thanks to the migration of liquidity from Uniswap, before peaking at more than 1.4 billion on September 12th. After that, however, its TVL dropped to its current level of 700 million.
One of the actions that has brought interest and funds back to Uniswap is the issuance of its UNI governance token.
The token was only officially announced last night, with 1 billion to be issued over the next four years, of which 60 percent will go to community members, 21.51 percent to team members and future employees, 17.8 percent to investors, and 0.69 percent to advisors.
Officially, team members will not participate directly in the governance of the project in the future, which will be left to all UNI holders. In fact, one of the main differences with Sushiswap was decentralized governance.
Among other things, this airdrop gave 130,000 UNI to the Sushiswap team members, who will therefore be able to participate, albeit to a small extent, in the governance of the rival project.
The token of Uniswap vs Sushi
The UNI token debuted tonight on the crypto markets at a price of $1.76 and then immediately jumped to over $4, an increase in value of 127% in just a few hours. Then it stabilized at about $3.
The Sushi token, on the other hand, had debuted at around $3.7 and then rose to $11 in the following days.
Since then its price has fallen, so much so that in the last two days it has gone from about $2.5 to the current $1.4, which is less than half of its initial value.
According to some analysts, it is possible that the issuance of the UNI token could be the beginning of the end of the Sushiswap project, or at least cause a significant drop in the price of the Sushi token.