Bessie Liu

The team behind popular decentralized exchange Uniswap has partnered with Talos, an institutional investing technology firm, to bring decentralized finance (DeFi) liquidity to institutional traders.



Uniswap Labs will be providing its Trading APIs to Talos clients in a familiar Talos order book format. There are also plans to enable Talos clients to use the UniswapX ecosystem in the near future. Institutional access to Uniswap will be supported by <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/fireblocks">Fireblocks</a>, a platform designed to store, move, and issue digital assets.&nbsp;



This latest partnership exemplifies growing institutional interest in crypto assets, driven primarily by the need for market depth and breadth, Roland Jarquio, the vice president of growth and product marketing at Talos told Blockworks.



“Some institutional investors are looking for exposure to certain protocols and projects that can only be traded on DEXs like Uniswap,” Jarquio said. Others, Jarquio notes, are looking to trade at a scale and need deeper liquidity in assets such as ether (<a href="https://blockworks.co/price/eth">ETH</a>).&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Why are institutions interested in DeFi?&nbsp;</h2>



Following Ethereum’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/shapella-upgrade-brings-ethereum-closer-to-long-awaited-withdrawals">Shapella upgrade earlier this year</a>, many institutions have <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/shapella-institutional-interest-blockchain">started to make moves</a> in the DeFi space.&nbsp;



Generally speaking, DeFi lending protocols offer <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/some-defi-yield-could-still-be-higher-than-10-year-us-treasurys">higher yields</a> than many traditional financial opportunities.&nbsp;



Liquid staking, for example, allows institutional investors to deposit assets into a proof-of-stake protocol while retaining a token with which they can generate additional yield by providing market-making liquidity. The result is higher-yield-bearing portfolios than they could construct in traditional financial markets.&nbsp;



A <a href="https://uniswap.org/TheDominanceofUniswapv3Liquidity.pdf">recent report</a> further shows that for certain trading pairs, AMMs such as <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/uniswap">Uniswap</a> v3 have proven to have deeper liquidity than centralized exchanges. The report highlights that:



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>For ETH/USD, Uniswap has ~2x more liquidity than both Binance and Coinbase.</li>



<li>For ETH/BTC, Uniswap has ~3x more liquidity than Binance and ~4.5x more liquidity than Coinbase.</li>



<li>For ETH/mid-cap pairs, Uniswap has, on average, ~3x more liquidity than major centralized exchanges.</li>
</ul>



Tokenized real-world assets are also gaining traction, with DeFi protocols having facilitated over <a href="https://app.rwa.xyz/">$4.5 billion</a> in private credit across the globe.&nbsp;



Jarquio notes that it is “hard to say” what the growing interest from institutional investors in the DeFi sector could imply, but for its institutional clients, this partnership gives them an additional source of liquidity.



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Uniswap Labs partnership brings institutional access to DeFi

Decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Uniswap has lifted the curtain on its protocol’s fourth iteration.&nbsp;



Uniswap Labs, the team behind the protocol, has released a draft code, looking for community contributions to build out <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/uniswap" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Uniswap</a> v4.



Like Uniswap v3, the latest version of the protocol will be under business source license 1.1, meaning its code can not be forked or copied for commercial use over the next four years, with it then converting to a GPL license.&nbsp;



Exceptions must be approved by Uniswap Governance, voters using UNI tokens, that oversees the protocol, or be granted special exceptions by developers at Uniswap Labs.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Creating custom pools through “hooks”</h2>



Uniswap v4 code will be entirely open-sourced and introduce what the team calls “hooks.”&nbsp;



In an interview with Blockworks, Sara Reynolds, protocol engineer at Uniswap Labs, said hooks are smart contracts that can be plugged into different pools.



“They are able to interact and build on top of these custom pools,” Reynolds said. “We have some ideas around what hooks might look like and how people can use different kinds of custom pools, but a lot of it is still unknown and we’re excited to see what the community is going to build with hooks.”



An example of a type of functionality that hooks can introduce: acting as a time-weighted average market maker (TWAMM).



“It’s going to let users execute what we call the long term swap, or long term order,” Reynolds said. “You could swap USDC, or something like that, over a long period of time. This is cool for the use case of doing something like dollar cost averaging, where [over a set time period] you want to swap into a token.”



But such functionalities will not be introduced as part of the architecture. They’re rather something developers can build on top of the architecture itself through “hooks.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What’s different about the actual architecture?</h2>



Alongside the introduction of “hooks” the latest Uniswap v4 architecture will ensure that its pools all live within one single smart contract, or what the team calls a “singleton contract”.



Tokens will be transferred between one single smart contract, rather than between individual pools held in different smart contracts, which ought to cut down on gas fees.



It is estimated the new architectural design will reduce pool creation gas prices by over 99% in comparison to v3.&nbsp;



Singleton architecture will also be accompanied by “flash accounting,” Reynolds said.



Only net balances will be transferred in and out of pools — rather than having entire balances be transferred at the end of every swap.



“This is basically just a more efficient way to leverage the liquidity across all of these now different kinds of varying Uniswap pools,” she said.



No date has been set for deployment of v4, as Uniswap Labs anticipates feedback from the Uniswap community before determining its next course of action.



&#8220;We are releasing the draft code now so that v4 can be built in public, with open feedback and meaningful community contribution,&#8221; Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said in <a href="https://blog.uniswap.org/uniswap-v4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a blog post</a>. &#8220;We expect this will be a months-long process.&#8221;



Uniswap v3 was <a href="https://blog.uniswap.org/uniswap-v3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a> in March 2021 and deployed to Ethereum mainnet in May 2021.



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What has Uniswap Labs cooked up for v4?

<div id="highlights-block_6356d442414d5" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Uniswap Labs secured the largest amount of funding to ever go to a DeFi protocol in its latest Series B round led by Polychain Capital</li>
 <li>Celestia closed a $55 million deal to develop the modular blockchain scaling technology</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Venture dollars continue to flow into cryptocurrency startups, even as markets remain largely muted.



Most notably, Uniswap Labs — the team behind the <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/dex" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">largest</a> decentralized exchange (DEX), Uniswap — secured <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/uniswap-labs-valued-at-1-6b-after-165m-funding-round/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">$165 million</a> in a Series B round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from other investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm, SV Angel and Variant.



This fundraise, which is the largest-ever funding round for a DeFi protocol, brings Uniswap’s total valuation to $1.66 billion, sources familiar with the matter confirmed with Blockworks.&nbsp;



As Uniswap is not yet profitable, founder Hayden Adams said the company plans to tap the capital influx to expand products in a bid to become financially sustainable.



Crypto custodian Copper, meanwhile, drummed up <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/copper-in-midst-of-196m-funding-round/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">$196 million</a> as part of its ongoing Series C round.&nbsp;



The overall funding target for Copper has not been publicly determined. But a spokesperson told Blockworks the company has raised $181 million from new and existing shareholders. It also received a convertible debt-to-equity loan good for $15 million.&nbsp;



Copper’s latest fundraise was led by Barclays Ventures and Tiger Global Management. The company has previously received backing from Alan Howard, Dawn Capital and Target Global.&nbsp;



On a smaller scale, Web3 infrastructure companies are also being eyed by investors.&nbsp;



Chainsafe, a firm focused on protocol implementation and cryptographic technology, secured $18.75 million in a Series A led by Round13.&nbsp;



Other investors who participated in the round include NGC Ventures, HashKey Capital, Sfermion, Jsquare, ConsenSys, Digital Finance Group and Fenbushi Capital. The funding will allow ChainSafe to accelerate its plans to develop Web3 infrastructure for gaming.



Scaling startup Celestia was also on investors&#8217; radars, closing a <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/celestia-raises-55-million-for-new-modular-blockchain/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">$55 million deal </a>to continue the development of modular blockchain technology.



The round was led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital, with participation from Spartan Group, FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto.&nbsp;



Other notable recent funding rounds include:



<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>Blockchain development platform Tatum secured $41.5 million in a Series A round led by 3VC.</li><li>Singaporean crypto investment startup Pillow raised a $18.1 million Series A co-led by Accel and Quona Capital.</li><li>DeFi-focused hedge fund Edge Capital raises two separate funds of $66.8 million.</li><li>Shardeum, a sharded layer-1 blockchain based on the Ethereum virtual machine, closed a $18.2 million seed round at a $199 million valuation.</li></ul>



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Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Subscribe to the Empire newsletter</a>.



Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/onthemargin">Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter</a>.



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