BREAKING | Uniswap Launches NFT Trading and Announces $5M Airdrop
Uniswap Labs is launching NFT trading today, along with an accompanying $5M airdrop, according to a press release received by Lucky Trader.
Uniswap's NFT platform will serve as an aggregator, combining listings across OpenSea, X2Y2, LooksRare, Sudosap, Larva Labs, Foundation, and NFT20 at launch. The protocol is promising better prices, faster indexing, and safer smart contracts as its primary differentiator from existing aggregators.
Uniswap is also promising gas savings of up to 15 percent when compared to other aggregators. This is tied to its new open-sourced Universal Router contract that powers the marketplace, which can "save tens of thousands of gas units over other marketplaces."
The Universal Router will allow traders to unify ERC20 swaps with NFT purchases in one transaction and will soon become the default swap router for all Uniswap swaps. It will also allow users to split and interweave Uniswap trades, partially fill trades, wrap/unwrap ETH, and perform time-bound, signature-controlled token approvals.
The NFT trading marketplace will utilize trustless and open-source code, leveraging the same design principles from the decentralized crypto exchange protocol. In doing so, Uniswap becomes the first major NFT trading platform to open-source its code.
"NFTs and ERC-20 tokens have largely existed as two separate ecosystems within crypto, but both are essential to growing the digital economy," said Uniswap spokesperson, "Launching NFTs on Uniswap is our first step in building more interoperable experiences between the two."
Genie Airdrop
As a token of appreciation, Uniswap is airdropping $5 million to more than 15,000 wallets who had previously made trades with Genie, an NFT aggregator purchased by Uniswap earlier this year.
The airdrop snapshot was taken as of April 14, 2022, at 7:00 p.m. ET and has two tiers:
- A $300 tier is available to wallets that completed more than one transaction before the snapshot.
- A $1,000 tier is available to wallets that held the Genie:Genesis NFT as of the snapshot.
- Users are eligible per unique address, meaning multiple Genie:Genesis NFTs in the same wallet are only eligible once.
- This tier is also available to wallets that purchased a Genie:Genesis NFT or a Genie:Gem NFT between 12:59 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. ET on June 21st.
Users can check their wallet eligibility using a Dune dashboard provided by the Uniswap team.
To claim the $USDC airdrop, eligible participants should navigate to app.uniswap.org, connect their wallets, and if eligible a button will appear with the text "Claim Uniswap NFT airdrop."
Eligible participants will have 12 months to claim.
Gas Rebates Promotion
Uniswap is also running a gas rebates promotion to welcome new users trading NFTs on their platform.
The promotion begins today, Nov. 30, and runs through Dec. 14, 2022. The gas rebate is claimable starting Jan. 16, 2023, through the Uniswap app and will be available for 12 months.
The first 22,000 unique wallets that purchase an NFT during this period will qualify for the rebate on their first NFT transaction, and the rebate will be capped at 0.01 ETH ($12.75 at the time of writing). To reap the full rebate, users will need to have spent more than 0.01 ETH in gas. Those spending less than 0.01 ETH on gas will receive the amount of gas spent.
Overall, this is major news for NFT market participants as Uniswap has 4.45 million total users (compared to 2.4 million OpenSea users), who have executed over $1 trillion in trading volume (compared to OpenSea which is closer to ~$34B). The potential for token swaps and NFT purchases in one transaction will be a brand-new feature for the space and a major time and cost saver.
