$2B Locked: Uniswap Now Bigger Than Entire DeFi Industry Just Two Months Ago

Uniswap is now bigger than the entire decentralized finance (DeFi) space was just two months ago, as the trading protocol becomes the first to pass the $2 billion milestone in total value locked (TVL).

• Uniswap clocked the record figure just after midnight (UTC) Monday and currently has $2.06 billion worth of crypto assets locked in, according to DeFi Pulse.
• Testament to its neck-breaking growth, there's now more value just in Uniswap than there was in the entire DeFi space on July 9.
• As of press time, there's now more than $11 billion in TVL in DeFi, with Uniswap making up approximately 18% of that.
• The Ethereum-based Uniswap utilizes an automated market-making system leveraging liquidity pools so users can exchange or "swap" between ether (ETH) and any ERC-20 token.
• Holders are incentivized to deposit tokens in these liquidity pools with interest and a cut of the swap fee – the total balance in these pools together make up Uniswap's $2 billion TVL.
• Monday's news shows just how much Uniswap's fortunes have changed in the past few weeks.
• Back in early September, $830 million worth of vital liquidity moved to rival protocol SushiSwap, causing Uniswap's TVL to plunge to just $400 million by Sept. 10. (It should be noted, however, it wasn't a zero-sum game: Uniswap's TVL had been $230 million before the SushiSwap saga began.)
• A week later, in order to coax users back, Uniswap launched its own native UNI token and airdropped over $500 million to wallet addresses who had been using the protocol since before September.
• UNI has led users to quickly snap back to Uniswap and its TVL was approximately $1.8 billion just days after the token launched.
• The platform plans to issue and distribute 4 billion UNI tokens to the community over the next four years.
• The next biggest DeFi project, peer-to-peer lending platform Maker, trails slightly behind Uniswap at $1.96 billion TVL, according to DeFi Pulse.

See also: Stablecoins Hit $20B Milestone, a Nearly 300% Year-to-Date Surge