Uniswap breaks $1T in volume — but has only been used by 3.9M addresses

Decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap has topped $1 trillion in total trading volume since launching on Ethereum in late 2018.

That comes from a relatively small user base, however, indicating that there is a lot of potential growth to come. According to data from Uniswap Labs, which are major contributors to the development of the protocol and ecosystem, the DEX’s number of cumulative addresses hit around 3.9 million this month after just over three years.

The data was posted via Twitter on Tuesday, with the Uniswap Labs team noting that: “Over the past three years, the Protocol has Onboarded millions of users to the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), Introduced fair and permissionless trading, Lowered the barrier to liquidity provision.”

2/ Over the past three years, The Protocol has Onboarded millions of users to the world of DeFi Introduced fair and permissionless trading Lowered the barrier to liquidity provision pic.twitter.com/mT2ZzjMTav

Uniswap is currently supported on Ethereum and layer-2 scaling solutions Polygon, Optimism and Arbitrum. Uniswap Labs also revealed earlier this month that the DEX will be expanding out to two Ethereum Virtual Machine- (EVM)-compatible chains in Gnosis Chain, and Polkadot-based para-chain Moonbeam Network.

In terms of trade volume, Uniswap ranks well ahead of its competition in the DEX market. Data from CoinGecko shows that Uniswap’s v3 protocol generated $938 million worth of volume over the past 24 hours, representing 33% of the total market share.

In comparison, Binance Smart Chain-based PancakeSwap (v2) ranks second with $491 million and 17.3% of the market share.

When comparing Uniswaps’s 24 data with centralized exchanges (CEXs), its $938 million worth of volume places it well behind platforms such as Binance, FTX and Coinbase, which generated $12.2 billion, $1.95 billion and $1.79 billion, respectively.

Notably, however, the DEX is well ahead of some big players in the crypto sector such as Crypto.com and Kraken, which generated $724.9 million and $597.4 million each.

Uniswap has also amassed roughly $5.93 billion worth of total value locked (TVL), the fifth-largest sum in the DeFi sector, according to DefiLlama, while PancakeSwap ranks seventh with $4.27 billion worth of TVL. MakerDAO represents the largest platform with $9.82 billion in TVL.

Related: Uniswap launches venture capital wing for Web3 investments

Despite Uniswap’s ability to attract strong demand and liquidity, it hasn’t done much to sway the price of its native asset Uniswap (UNI) in 2022. Since the start of January, UNI has dropped around 67% to sit at $5.59 at the time of writing.

UNI’s all-time high of $44.92 was also back in early May 2021, and is down 87.5% since then.