Uniswap Labs Seeks to Raise Over $100M at a Valuation of $1B

Uniswap Labs, the brain behind the popular decentralized protocol Uniswap, plans to raise between $100 million and $200 million, which would bring its valuation to about $1 billion, TechCrunch reported on Friday.

Polychain Capital to Lead the Funding Round

According to four unidentified people who shared details of the intended fundraiser, American investment company Polychain Capital and one of Singapore’s sovereign funds are expected to join the funding round.

However, the report remains unconfirmed since no official comment has been made by either Uniswap Labs or any of the investors.

Uniswap to Expand Services

According to the people, the fund is geared toward expanding the services offered by the Uniswap protocol.

While no specific purpose for the fund was stated, it could be that Uniswap Labs will make provisions for its 4.2 million users to trade non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the platform from some NFT marketplaces.

Note that, shortly after the news of the intended fund round, UNI, the native token of the Uniswap protocol, saw a mild 8% increase, where it traded at $6.6. At the time of writing, the UNI token traded at $6.4.

Uniswap Holds More than Half of Market Share

As the funding is intended to bolster the services offered in the Uniswap protocol, the company seeks to grow its gigantic system. Since its emergence as the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) in 2020, the Uniswap protocol has continued to make waves in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. 

In July, it was confirmed that Uniswap accounted for 60% of the entire DEX market while recording a total of $145 billion in traded volume. 

According to the analytics platform DeFiLlama, the entire DEX market currently records a daily traded volume of $1.9 billion. Uniswap, on its part, holds over 56% of the entire DEX market share, seeing a daily traded volume of around $1 billion.

Meanwhile, Uniswap attained an all-time trading volume of over $1 trillion with four million users in May.