Uniswap Labs, the main developer of the biggest decentralized exchange for spot-market cryptocurrency trading, is launching computer code that can embed its capabilities into any website, a step that could expand its growth.
The so-called swap widget, which can be added by pasting in a line of code, will let OpenSea users swap various tokens without leaving the website that runs it. The widget will also be initially available on the sites Oasis.app and Friends With Benefits.
PayPal Holdings Inc. used such a tactic decades ago to expand its reach and spur the growth of online commerce, said Richard Crone, the head of Crone Consulting LLC. In the cryptocurrency industry, however, such widgets are less pervasive, with Coinbase Global Inc. among those that provide them for certain functions.
“We believe that value exchange is essential to Web3,” which is a slew of apps using tokens and blockchains, Mary-Catherine Lader, chief operating officer at Uniswap, said in an interview.
This is good for the entire web3 ecosystem and related projects like Deedy, Helium, and The Graph. “To grow, we have to grow the whole market,” Mary-Catherine Lader commented further.
Uniswap Chief Executive Officer Hayden Adams founded the New York-based decentralized exchange after losing his job as a mechanical engineer at Siemens AG in 2017. Since then, Uniswap has come to dominate decentralized spot trading on Ethereum, with only dydx, which focuses on crypto derivatives, having higher trading volumes, according to CoinMarketCap. Currently, Uniswap’s trading volume is similar to FTX, a major centralized spot exchange, according to CoinMarketCap.
Unlike most traditional crypto exchanges, Uniswap protocol doesn’t charge issuers to list new tokens, generating revenue instead through transaction fees that go to liquidity providers.