by Cynthia Ezirim 
Uniswap’s latest feat comes less than two months after the Uniswap Foundation proposed a reward mechanism for UNI token holders.
The trading volume of decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Uniswap has just hit a new all-time high, surpassing $2 trillion for the first time since the protocol was launched in 2018.
According to a dashboard on the crypto analytics platform Dune, Uniswap’s trading volume hovered at $2.02 trillion at the time of writing, with a 24-hour volume of $2.8 billion.
Uniswap Trading Volume Exceeds $2T
Uniswap smashed the $1 trillion trading volume milestone in May 2022 and, within two years, has amassed another $1 trillion amid increasing competition in the decentralized exchange space. The exchange remains, by far, the largest decentralized exchange by trading volume, taking up 54.7% of the market share, with its rival PancakeSwap following behind with 23.2% of the market share.
Uniswap’s latest feat comes less than two months after the Uniswap Foundation proposed a reward mechanism for UNI token holders. The proposed protocol governance upgrade aims to incentivize “active, engaged, and thoughtful delegation” by implementing a fee mechanism that rewards UNI holders who have delegated and staked their tokens.
Although UNI rallied roughly 50% from $7 to $11 on the news, the asset had retraced its steps at the time of writing. Data from Cryptocurrencies to Watch showed the token changing hands at $10.86, down 2.6% in the past 24 hours, apparently unaffected by Uniswap’s new achievement.
Uniswap’s Upcoming V3 Upgrade
Although Uniswap’s $2 trillion milestone is remarkable, the decentralized exchange’s trading volume is still below that of major centralized crypto exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and OKX, which have seen $26 billion, $3.4 billion, and $4.2 billion in the past 24 hours alone.
Other decentralized finance (DeFi) projects have higher development activity than Uniswap. Recently, market intelligence platform Santiment listed the top ten DeFi-related coins by development frequency, and UNI came sixth, below Osmosis (OSMO), dYdX (DYDX), Synthetix (SNX), Radix (XRD), and Fox (FOX). Santiment drew its conclusion from analyzing the GitHub activities of project repositories via a back-tested process.
Meanwhile, the Uniswap Foundation plans to release an upgrade for the Uniswap v3 in the third quarter of the year since Dencun has been successfully deployed on the Ethereum mainnet. The v3 upgrade will introduce features to optimize gas fees and allow for dynamic adjustments.
