Back in June, Uniswap labs announced that they had acquired the NFT aggregator Genie, and planned to refurbish and rebrand their infrastructure into a Uniswap NFT marketplace. Last week they launched with listings across Opensea, X2Y2 and LooksRare. The UI is sleek and in line with the theme of their DEX, everything looks nice and polished. Performance wise I can’t say as I haven’t bought anything yet, but I don’t think they are or need to aim for high performance like Blur. Their obvious target market is your average NFT investor/Opensea user, just like their DEX appeals not to traders trying to save a few basis points on a trade, but to users who want easy swaps.
Aggregators are not a new tech, any serious trader has been using them since early 2022 to get the best prices across multiple marketplaces. As soon as Genie came out, Gem was just around the corner. The more marketplaces that pop up, the more the demand for a trading experience that puts all those prices in one place. Around the same time that Uniswap bought Genie, Opensea bought Gem and the competition was on. To sweeten the deal, Uniswap announced a retroactive airdrop paid in $USDC to early Genie users. Anyone who executed more than 1 transaction on Genie before the snapshot in April can claim $300, and anyone who held the genesis Genie NFT can claim $1000.
Uniswap has always come from a place of wanting to better the whole ecosystem, putting decentralisation first and providing public goods like their comprehensive developer SDK’s. As per the initial announcement back in June, they plan to provide the same quality data for NFT’s:
“We’ll also integrate NFTs into our developer APIs and widgets, making Uniswap a comprehensive platform for users and builders in web3”
Good news for the NFT builders, certain bits of reliable NFT data are quite hard to obtain at the moment, being provided by the few and on their terms. Competition breeds innovation and I’m super happy to see an entity like Uniswap enter the NFT game.
