Uniswap’s UNI Gains 20% as Most DeFi Tokens Suffer Losses

By Jose Antonio Lanz

The newborn token that now allows the Ethereum-based decentralized exchange Uniswap to be community run has spiked by more than 20% in the last 24 hours. It’s now trading for roughly $5 per token. Meanwhile, however, the rest of the DeFi market isn’t faring so well—and the same goes for the broader crypto market, too.

The birth of UNI was bombastic. Two days of hype pushed the token from just $0.30 at launch to $6.90 the next day. Since then, trading on UNI has cooled, and the price dropped all the way down to $3.90 yesterday. Something changed overnight, however, and Uniswap fans have seemingly grown tired of seeing UNI in the red.

Uniswap’s token currently ranks 36th among all cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, which today rebounded to $614 million. That’s enough for sixth among so-called DeFi tokens, according to CoinGecko.

Uniswap (UNI) price. Source: TradingView

Studying charts won’t get you very far with UNI. It is still only a week old after all. The token is still only finding its way within the crypto market, and there are no past trends to reference to make any future predictions on its price.

For UNI, it all seemingly comes down to market sentiment at the moment. Though, curiously, as hot as the DeFi market has been in 2020, most tokens associated with decentralized finance are down today. In fact, some of the biggest tokens in the DeFi space are down a lot within the past week.

Chainlink, for example, is down 24% over the last seven days. Yearn.finance’s YFI has lost 30% to its price, now trading for $25,000 per token. DeFi lending protocol Aave’s token LEND is likewise down 16%, while UMA, the seventh-most capitalized DeFi coin, is down a whopping 37% in the last week.

Of course, the same basically holds true for the entire market. Crypto took a $22 billion hit on Monday as Bitcoin’s price fell close to 5%, settling around $10,400. Traditional markets likewise have felt the pain, with the Dow falling 800 points. Neither crypto nor stocks have yet fully recovered from that drop.

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