On Tuesday, a popular crypto start-up and founders of a leading decentralized exchange of the name Uniswap announced the acquisition of Genie, an NFT marketplace aggregator, as it plans to launch NFT trading on Uniswap soon.
“We’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired Genie, the first NFT marketplace aggregator, which lets anyone discover and trade NFTs across most platforms,” the company’s blog post read. “NFTs will be integrated into our products, starting with the Uniswap web app, where soon you’ll be able to buy and sell NFTs across all major marketplaces. We’ll also integrate NFTs into our developer APIs and widgets, making Uniswap a comprehensive platform for users and builders in web3.”
While the company did not reveal details of the deal in the blog post, Uniswap reveals that it plans to reward users of the platform before the acquisition through a USDC airdrop. The airdrop is slated to start in August and run for a year.
The platform has dabbled in NFTs in the past, launching the first NFT liquidity pool in 2019. However, it is worth noting that NFTs, like the rest of the crypto space, has had a difficult year.
DappRadar data shows that NFT activity on the leading NFT marketplace OpenSea has taken a serious hit in the last 30 days. According to the analytics website, the NFT trading volume on OpenSea has dropped by 74.23% in the last 30 days.
Notably, Uniswap’s acquisition of Genie comes at a time when the crypto market downturn and increasingly worrying macroeconomic environment have forced several leading crypto companies to downsize and miners to sell their Bitcoin rewards. Uniswap, with this acquisition, joins the likes of Binance, which have revealed expansion plans despite the recent market woes that pushed the entire crypto market cap below $1 trillion, a long way from the highs of almost $3 trillion in November.
Uniswap remains the number one crypto decentralized exchange. The DEX commands 34% of the market share, according to data from CoinGecko.
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