The Defiant

Uniswap Fulfills its Unicorn Destiny with $165M Funding Round

Leading DeFi Player Joins Elite Club of $1B+ Ventures as Members Deploy DEX on Another Network

By: Tarang Khaitan Loading...

Uniswap Fulfills its Unicorn Destiny with $165M Funding Round

The DeFi company famed for its unicorn logo has finally become a real life unicorn.

On Thursday, Uniswap Labs, the company behind the leading DEX Uniswap, raised a whopping $165M in a Series B fundraising round, according to an announcement.

The deal bestowed Uniswap with a $1.7B valuation, Fortune magazine reported. This round, led by Polychain Capital, included Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, SV Angel, and Variant Fund.

Elite Club

On Friday, Uniswap’s members voted overwhelmingly to deploy the DEX on the zkSync Layer 2 network on Ethereum.

Uniswap Labs now joins the ranks of a very elite club. OpenSea, Alchemy, Dapper Labs, Yuga Labs, Sky Mavis, Phantom Network, and 0x, are the seven DeFi companies who have achieved unicorn status by exceeding $1B in value, according to CB Insights. OpenSea tops the ranking with a valuation of $13.3B.

“For us, the industry has started to prove itself and we’re seeing the value of it, especially in this bear market when a lot of centralized infrastructure failed, and a lot of decentralized entities prevailed,” said Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap.

Uniswap Votes to Launch V3 on zkSync

Uniswap Votes to Launch V3 on zkSync

Leading DEX to Deploy on Layer 2 After Raising $165M in Funding Round

The Defiant The Defiant

This raise comes at a time when the cryptocurrency market is struggling to cope with a severe bear market deepened by soaring interest rates and inflation in the U.S. and Europe.

Moreover, the asset class is enduring scrutiny by regulators worldwide. In September 2021, news broke that Uniswap Labs iwas under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but no action has been taken.

In July, the Uniswap community voted to turn on the “fee switch”. This proposal was put forth by Leighton Cusack, co-founder of PoolTogether.

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Real Yield

Under this proposal, two major liquidity providers from Uniswap V3 would see 10% of their revenue being redirected to UNI tokenholders. This would turn the UNI token that has been widely criticized by the community, as a valueless governance token, into a token that generates real yield for its holders.

Uniswap’s native governance token UNI has jumped 5.3% in the last 30 days compared to a 16% decline in ETH.

On June 22, Uniswap Labs acquired Genie, an NFT marketplace aggregator, with plans to integrate NFTs into the Uniswap DEX. This was not the only NFT move by Uniswap Labs who, on July 23, announced plans of integration with SudoSwap.

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