Uniswap Labs Bags $165 Million Funding, Valuation Jumps to $1.66 Billion

In a Series B funding round, Uniswap Labs raised a fresh capital of $165 million (roughly Rs. 1,360 crore). The round was led by investment firm Polychain Capital and saw participation from other venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Paradigm, and Variant among others. The freshly raised capital would be used to add a plethora of new products, that have been in Uniswap’s pipeline for a while now. Founded in 2018, the market cap of Uniswap Labs has touched the total valuation of $1.66 billion (roughly Rs. 13,675 crore).

Out of the several projects that Uniswap is looking to launch, one will enable people to trade NFT on Uniswap from a bunch of marketplaces, a TechCrunch report quoted people familiar with the matter as saying. The company is also exploring the idea of rolling out a crypto wallet.

“As Uniswap Labs focuses on products, a much broader ecosystem continues to grow and thrive beyond what any one company can do on their own,” the company said in a blog post.

As an example, the governance community recently voted to create the Uniswap Foundation. This newly founded body will contribute to the Uniswap protocol’s decentralised development and give at least $60 million (roughly Rs. 495 crore) in grants to community projects over the next few years.

Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Uniswap allows users to swap ERC-20 tokens – that can be used to represent a wide array of digital assets as well as financial values. Uniswap exchanges only list tokens built on the Ethereum blockchain. In the coming times, Uniswap Labs could bring about security advancements to its systems as well.

In July 2022, hackers stole around ETH 7,500, worth more than $8.1 million (roughly Rs. 64.45 crore), from Uniswap via a phishing attack. The event data on the blockchain was altered by the scammers to make it seem as though Uniswap was airdropping tokens to platform liquidity providers.

When the users connected their wallets to the contract’s website, which resembles Uniswap, native tokens (ETH), ERC20 tokens, and NFTs (namely Uniswap LP positions) were snatched from their wallets.