Mixed reviews: Is Uniswap really the "Tencent of the crypto world"?

Author: Jaleel, BlockBeats

Editor: Zhang Wen, BlockBeats

Just one month after the announcement of V4, Uniswap has launched a new product again. Founder Hayden Adams announced the upcoming cross-AMM, Dutch auction-based aggregation protocol: UniswapX at ETHCC.

UniswapX aims to create a new trading experience in the coming months: it will aggregate liquidity sources to enhance trading value, effectively prevent MEV, provide gasless trading, eliminate costs for failed transactions, and further expand to support cross-chain gasless trading, making users' trading experience better and more efficient.

What Makes UniswapX Special

The innovation of UniswapX lies in its ability to aggregate liquidity by outsourcing routing complexity to an open network of third-party fillers, thus providing better prices. Traders using UniswapX do not need to worry about price issues; the trading process is transparent, the results are public, and all transactions are settled on-chain. All orders are supported by the Uniswap smart order router, forcing fillers to compete with Uniswap v1, v2, v3, and the future v4.

In terms of achieving gasless trading, UniswapX also demonstrates different strategies. The unique off-chain orders signed by traders will be submitted on-chain by fillers who pay the gas on behalf of the traders. Since traders do not need to pay gas, they incur no costs during trading, even when handling failed transactions.

As for preventing MEV, UniswapX shows strong determination. Any MEV captured by arbitrage trades will be returned to traders by raising prices. Furthermore, UniswapX helps users avoid more intuitive forms of MEV extraction, where orders executed in the filler’s inventory cannot be inserted, and fillers are incentivized to use private transaction relays to route orders to on-chain liquidity venues.

When we talk about gasless cross-chain trading, the vision that UniswapX is about to realize is already unfolding before our eyes. It will merge swapping and bridging into a seamless operation, allowing traders to exchange between chains in just a few seconds, even choosing the assets they receive on the target chain, rather than being limited to specific bridge tokens.

However, the community is not satisfied with Uniswap's new product.

Mixed Reviews: Is UniswapX = CoWSwap + 1inch?

In the eyes of many community members and KOLs, UniswapX is praised as an innovator and holds great expectations. KOL Patrimonio.Defi (@Iampatrimonio) lauded the launch of this cross-AMM aggregation protocol UniswapX: "Uniswap is like Apple… releasing a new version every five working days."

Paradigm researcher Dan Robinson (@danrobinson) highly praised the changes brought by UniswapX on social media: "I think UniswapX changes the game for decentralized exchanges, MEV, and interoperability," and detailed five reasons.

However, beneath Dan Robinson's tweet, the official account of Curve Finance offered a different perspective, hinting at a different tone: "Dan, with all due respect. The game was changed long ago: when 1inch first did high-quality aggregation, when CoWSwap launched the Solvers model. UniswapX is good, but it is not a pioneer, nor even the second player."

Undoubtedly, Curve Finance believes Uniswap is copying.

Some community members also raised questions: "What is the difference between UniswapX and CoWSwap?" "Isn't this basically CoWSwap?" "UniswapX should thank the open-source spirit of the crypto industry," "Uniswap v4 is Crocswap; UniswapX is Cowswap."

CoWSwap's official account also tweeted several times, accompanied by sarcastic meme images, welcoming Uniswap to further validate its trading design, seemingly mocking Uniswap for imitating them.

Is Uniswap Really the "Tencent of Crypto"?

In the sea of crypto, Uniswap is like a massive ship, leading the course of decentralized trading platforms with its immense influence. The launch of UniswapX has sparked heated discussions and also prompted us to reflect on whether the ship's voyage will create waves that make it difficult for smaller boats to navigate.

In terms of positioning Uniswap, people inevitably compare it to the concept of "the Tencent of crypto."

Many believe that the launch of UniswapX undoubtedly delivers a heavy blow to many decentralized trading platforms. As a new product of Uniswap, UniswapX integrates aggregation, non-custodial, and Dutch auction-based models to prevent MEV, provide gasless trading, and even expand to support cross-chain gasless trading.

For Uniswap, this is a natural extension of its product line; however, it may also cause other decentralized trading platforms like CoWSwap and 1inch to lose part of their future market share.

Furthermore, many projects on the path of innovation may find that instead of competing with Uniswap, it is better to become part of the Uni ecosystem. In the field of decentralized trading platforms, Uniswap's position is almost unshakable. Like a guiding giant ship, Uniswap's influence sweeps across the board. Coupled with its unique legitimacy in the crypto industry, Uniswap holds a crucial position within the entire sector.

In other words, only when innovative features are launched on Uniswap can they be considered truly legitimate; conversely, projects focusing on specific innovative features will lose their unique selling points and positioning, just like the current CoWSwap and 1inch.

KOL DeFi Cheetah (@DeFi_Cheetah), who has worked in VC and hedge funds, hopes to vindicate CoWSwap and 1inch: For those excited about the UniswapX update, have you heard of CoWSwap and 1inch? I truly believe these teams are also striving for innovation, just like Uni v4.

UniswapX certainly has functional similarities with other products, but we cannot deny that Uniswap may also be the most forked DeFi protocol. As one of the pioneers of decentralized trading platforms, Uniswap has reached where it is today largely due to its own innovation.

Returning to the iteration upgrade of Uniswap V4 in mid-June, compared to version V3, V4 offers more flexible asset composability and significantly reduces gas fees.

The core feature of Uniswap V4, Hooks, allows every developer to create customized DEXs that meet specific scenario needs, building their own "LEGO blocks." Hooks are plugins used for customizing liquidity pools, swaps, fees, and interactions with liquidity provider (LP) positions. Through the Hooks mechanism, developers can execute specific operations at key moments in the lifecycle of liquidity pools, such as before/after swaps or before/after LP position changes.

Therefore, with the new feature Hooks, developers do not need to develop other DEXs; they only need to customize liquidity in Hooks and add front-end pages and elements that meet their needs to establish "designated venues," while also not having to worry about liquidity shortages in these "designated venues."

Related Reading: "Everything You Need to Know About Uniswap V4"

If calling Uniswap "the Tencent of crypto" seems a bit harsh, it appears to stem more from the emotional release of not seeing expected innovative products. Uniswap has emerged from a purely innovative project that carried hundreds of billions of dollars in liquidity with just 500 lines of code, and everyone naturally hopes that every product launch will be a stunning surprise. However, no one can achieve that forever. Apple also releases features that have long been implemented on Android, but is that wrong?

The relationship between new technologies and new products is not simply an equation; old technologies taken to the extreme can also make new products stand out.