UNI, the governance token of the Uniswap decentralized exchange, outperformed the crypto market on Oct. 10, posting a 15% daily gain following the launch of its own layer-2 network, Unichain. The price of UNI is up 25% over the last week and 23% in the past 30 days.
UNI/USD daily chart. Source: TradingView
UNI’s trading volume has increased 418% on the day to $583.2 million. With a market capitalization of $5 billion, UNI has claimed the 20th position on the CoinMarketCap ranking.
This performance comes after Uniswap Labs announced that it was launching Unichain, an application-specific layer-2 blockchain network.
Uniswap Labs said that Unichain is designed to deliver faster and cheaper transactions and enhanced interoperability across blockchain networks.
Source: Uniswap Labs
The app chain will initially feature 1-second block times, with plans to eventually reduce block times to less than 250 milliseconds.
“Unichain will launch with one-second block times, and will soon introduce 250ms “sub-blocks” that will make user experiences feel instant.”
Built on Optimism’s Superchain, Unichain will enable traders to access liquidity from other L2 networks in the superchain including Coinbase layer-2 Base and Synthentix’s SNAXchain.
Related: Uniswap launches its own layer-2, Unichain
Following the proposal, UNI’s price jumped over 17% from the opening of $7.20 to reach an intraday high of $8.46 on Oct. 10, according to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView.
According to CoinGlass data, the rally has also seen Uniswap become one of the most liquidated tokens in the last 12 hours. The figure below shows that more than $1.5 million leveraged UNI positions have been liquidated over the past 12 hours, with $1.2 million making up short UNI liquidations.
Crypto liquidation heat map. Source: CoinGlass
More data from market intelligence firm CryptoQuant reveals an increase in Uniswap’s network activity. According to the chart below, the number of daily transactions has increased from a low of 40 on Oct. 9 to a high of 673 on Oct. 10, representing a 1,582% surge.
Uniswap transaction count. Source: CryptoQuant
The number of active addresses has also jumped by 587% over the same period. This points to increasing adoption of the Uniswap ecosystem, which drives up demand for UNI tokens.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.