DEX battle
UNI prices reached their highest ever levels of $15.50 a few hours ago according to Coingecko. The move has added 5% on the day while most other high cap crypto assets are retreating in the shadow of their big brother.
UNI has now made a whopping 60% over the past seven days and almost 300% since the same time last month when it was priced at just $3.60. Its rival and former fork SushiSwap has retreated a little as its token falls by 5% on the day back to $7.30.
Both decentralized exchanges are doing very well in terms of liquidity lockup and trading volumes, however, as observed by researcher Lucas Campbell in the latest Bankless newsletter.
The rivalry between these two DeFi titans has been heating up in recent weeks and it is no surprise considering their history. One was spawned from the other but has made it in its own right and is now vying for the title of top DEX.
Diving into the on-chain metrics, the Bankless newsletter has broken the competition down into several rounds, giving Uniswap the first one for trading volume. Over the past three weeks, Uniswap has averaged almost $6 billion in weekly volume whereas SushiSwap processed around $2.8 billion it noted.
The next round was liquidity which also went Uniswap’s way with just over $3 billion versus just under $2 billion. The total value locked across both decentralized exchanges is currently higher than it was for the entire DeFi ecosystem back in mid-August, 2020.
In terms of daily revenue, Uniswap also comes out ahead with the DEX averaging over $2.3 million in fees to liquidity providers per day in January 2021.
SushiSwap starts to win a couple of rounds back in terms of price to sales ratio which compares a token’s market cap to the protocol’s revenue. SushiSwap has been holding steady with a P/S ratio of ~5 while Uniswap recently touched ~15, it added,
“With the above in mind, the market is currently overvaluing Uniswap relative to SushiSwap strictly in terms of the cash flows it generates today.”
The price to volume ratio, which is similar to the above, also comes out in SushiSwap’s favor with the market is currently valuing SushiSwap at around $4 for every $1 in volume that it facilitates on a daily basis, while this ratio is higher for Uniswap at around $11 for every $1 in volume it processes.
The final metric was price performance and both tokens have had a massive run-up recently. This one can be measured in different ways, but Bankless gives it to SushiSwap measuring percentage price increase since the beginning of Q4, 2020.
Overall, Uniswap still has the upper hand, but its rival is catching up. The launch of Uniswap v3 is likely to give it even more momentum to retain its accolade as the world’s leading DEX.