Uniswap Eyes $100-200 Million Raise in Expansion Plan

Crypto might just have a new unicorn.

Uniswap, DeFi’s dominant decentralized exchange by trading volume, is raising between $100 million and $200 million at a $1 billion valuation.

Besides its huge amount of money, the round is notable for including mainstream names like Polychain Capital and Singapore’s sovereign fund. Clearly, something big is brewing here.

But what can it be? Why would a DEX need so much money?

The Uniswap Expansion Plan

The reason for Uniswap’s money thirst is simple: they need capital for their expansion plans.

Although the expansion plans aren’t set in stone, we can speculate on what might be on the way:

• One confirmed development is the production of an NFT marketplace, as this has been underway since June when Uniswap bought NFT aggregator Genie. To understand why Uniswap wants to enter the NFT market, just imagine Uniswap combined with OpenSea. Utter dominance.

• Techcrunch also cites sources that claim Uniswap is developing a crypto wallet. This also makes a lot of sense for Uniswap as dominant crypto wallet Metamask pulls in millions of dollars daily from swap fees. Millions of dollars that a Uniswap wallet could capture instead.

• Another development that has been speculated about is the creation of a Uniswap appchain. What this means is that instead of being an app built on top of blockchains like Ethereum, Uniswap would become a blockchain itself. This article by crypto VC firm Nascent explains why this is attractive, but the TLDR is that appchains capture more value for UNI holders. In other words, an appchain would make Uniswap more money.

Although these are all great plans for Uniswap the protocol, they don’t directly point to value for UNI the token.

At this point, UNI is still just a valueless governance token, and none of these expansion plans seem to remedy that. Hopefully, that is changed in the future, but for now, UNI doesn’t look like a must-buy.