Uniswap aims to become the marketplace for ‘all digital assets’: NFT CEO
As Uniswap debuted its new NFT marketplace aggregator on Wednesday, it also shut down Genie, the NFT marketplace aggregator it had acquired in June.
“The genie went back into the lamp,” joked Scott Gray, Genie founder turned Uniswap NFT chief.
But Uniswap’s NFT marketplace isn’t just Genie with new magenta branding, Gray insists. In an interview with The Defiant, Gray touched on the difference between the two aggregators, Genie’s acquisition of Uniswap, the NFT conyal debate and why certain marketplaces are not featured in the new platform.
This summer, Gray approached Uniswap Labs’ fledgling venture fund to seek an investment that would help the company scale, he said. Teo Leibowitz, the head of Uniswap Labs Ventures, countered with an acquisition.
“I didn’t really think too much about it just because we were pretty set on raising money,” he said. “And then we had a conversation with Hayden [Adams, Uniswap founder]and I think that’s when everything clicked.”
Adams laid out a vision in which they created a platform that would serve as “the marketplace for all digital assets,” Gray said.
Bridging DeFi and NFTs
In a look on Rug Radio Wednesday, Adams said the move would bring two relatively siled communities under one roof.
Only 20% of people who have bought an NFT have previously used a DEX. Part of it is just about bringing the user bases closer together.
Hayden Adams
The Genie team “completely went back to the drawing board after the acquisition,” Gray said, focusing on reducing the cost of trading NFTs, listing a larger number of NFTs and decentralizing the protocol.
At its launch on Wednesday, Uniswap touted 15% lower transaction fees than competing aggregators and listings sourced from eight different marketplaces. Uniswap also published the code behind the user interface and the smart contract that runs the marketplace itself.
Open source
“Everyone can contribute; anyone can fork [and] compete with us on the interface and the smart contract,” Gray said. “We are the first major NFT marketplace to have an open source front end.”
Uniswap enters a crowded market that includes several upstarts, including SudoSwap, a new NFT marketplace that launched earlier this year. Among SudoSwap’s innovations is sudoAMM, which allows users to deposit ETH and a combination of NFTs from a single pool, along a specific price range, called a bond curve. They can then earn trading fees when other users exchange NFTs for ETH or vice versa.
Royalty-free Sudoswap finds favor with NFT traders
Cumulative trading volume on sudoAMM has passed $10 million
The model allows users to deploy a pool that will programmatically buy or sell an NFT at a given price, similar to limit orders. Users also have the ability to sell NFTs instantly into a pool at a stated price, rather than having to accept a bid like on OpenSea.
No plans for NFT AMM
Despite Uniswap’s position as the leading automated market maker in decentralized finance, there are no plans for the Uniswap NFT marketplace to implement a sudoAMM-style feature, according to Gray.
He and mononymous SudoSwap founder Owen are friends, and the innovations SudoSwap brought to the NFT market are partly what inspired him to create Genie, he said.
“He really killed it with SudoSwap, and Uniswap as an aggregator supports innovation, making sure those innovations and those market efficiencies are brought to the fore and discoverable,” Gray said. “We think right now SudoSwap has a really good solution and there’s no way we can really innovate. We don’t want to just compete for that.”
In addition to SudoSwap, Uniswap pulls entries from OpenSea, X2Y2, LooksRare, Larva Labs, Foundation, NFT20 and NFTX. A notable omission is Blur, the Paradigm-backed marketplace that launched in October and quickly became the second most popular marketplace by transaction volume. The reason is simple, according to Gray.
Blur integration
“We were really looking forward to integrating Blur, but they don’t have a public-facing API yet,” he said. “Once they hand it over to us, we’ll integrate them ASAP.”
Part of Blur’s popularity stems from the fees – or lack thereof. Blur charges no transaction fees and allows traders to buy and sell without imposing royalties requested by artists. Trading on Blur is, for all intents and purposes, free, which has allowed it to gain market share as other platforms have made the decision to enforce creator fees.
Marketplaces that made payment optional this year have faced intense pushback from artists who say they would never have engaged in NFTs if not for the promise that they could earn recurring income from secondary sales of their work.
Agnostic on royalties
As an aggregator, Uniswap’s NFT marketplace will be agnostic on the issue, Gray said.
“We do not determine royalties for the creator; we take the properties of The Defiant – DeFi News marketplace[s] – So no matter what policy they have, he said. “Users should be able to vote with their dollars, with their support, which principles they follow most.”
Future plans include making and accepting offers across all integrated marketplaces simultaneously, Gray said.
“We’re trying to solve the capital inefficiencies in the market, and for NFTs, there’s a lot of that,” he said. “People mention that NFTs are not a liquid market. Well, that’s because it’s very early and nobody did the hard work of building all this infrastructure.”
