By Austin Adams
Doing research at Uniswap Labs means I meet a lot of people about their crypto journey. One of the things I hear most often is that Uniswap is the first time in DeFi where it really clicked for them.
Note: Spoken by notable and long-time Uniswap enjoyer, joseph.eth
Unsurprisingly, I wanted to dig into the numbers. Was everyone talking about Uniswap because they were chatting with me, or did the data back up? __Of all new wallet transactions on the interface, around 55% of these users are doing their first swap ever. An additional 25% did their first swap on Uniswap within a day of their first Ethereum transaction. __
The amount of new daily wallets on the interface is also significant, with around 35,000 new wallets per day swapping on the Interface (spiking with volatility and token launches). While that doesn’t necessarily translate to 35,000 new users every day, there are still a large subset who are net new.
For early crypto adopters, it’s easy to understand why Uniswap was so memorable. In the early days, even on a platform like Coinbase, you had to pick from a drop down menu of limited token pairs and you had no idea what the cost was going to be – to say it wasn’t user friendly would be putting it mildly.
Uniswap was the first to pioneer the token swap model, where you could plug in the token you wanted to put in and the token you wanted to get out and get an accurate price and tokens that you actually end up in your wallet. A few clicks later, you had the token you needed in your self custody wallet and you were off to the races.
Today, the best swap experience can be a hard thing to define. It’s a million small choices over time – on both the front end and the back end – that help users swap, whether it's for the first time or the 100,000th time. But the numbers don’t lie, and Uniswap is leading the charge to bring more people into DeFi.
Thank you for reading the blog about some fun numbers. If you love numbers and market structure (and are in a PhD program 👀), and want to work with me, please apply here.