Uniswap Labs, the holding firm of decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap, announced on Tuesday that it had completed the acquisition of NFT marketplace aggregator Genie. The move will enable the DEX to further expand its product offering with NFTs.
“We’re trying to bring everything we brought to the ERC-20 space to the NFT space”
said Uniswap founder and CEO Hayden Adams in an interview with Bankless.
Genie will be integrated into Uniswap’s web app, and users can start trading immediately. A new tab dedicated to NFTs will be added to its main app later this year. NFTs will also be included in its developers’ APIs and widgets.
To reward early supporters, Uniswap will airdrop stablecoin USDC for members who have used the marketplace at least twice before April 15 and to the owners of GENIE NFTs. Airdrops will start from August and can be claimed anytime in the following 12 months. Uniswap has not revealed the airdrop amount.
OpenSea, LooksRare, and Coinbase NFT are some of the leading marketplaces for NFT trading. However, very few offer the ability to trade multiple NFTs in one transaction or provide aggregation tools that display listings from other marketplaces. With this acquisition, Uniswap will be able to offer both, which might turn out to be a potential threat to competitors.
The NFT-aggregator space is witnessing some consolidation that took off recently. Gem, another NFT marketplace, was acquired by Opensea two months ago. It will bring the ability to buy multiple NFTs in one transaction.
Uniswap started dabbling with NFTs back in 2019 with Unisocks, an NFT liquidity pool backed by physical pairs of socks.
The acquisition of Genie will have no impact on Uniswap’s current operations, including the Protocol, Governance, or its native token.
