Uniswap — The Latest Opensea Competitor

Some brief thoughts on the new announcement from Uniswap getting into the NFT game

Last week Uniswap Labs announced that they’ve acquired Geniexyz and are now expanding out to become an NFT marketplace aggregator so that Uniswap users can buy both ERC20s and ERC721s.

Uniswap Labs 🦄 @Uniswap

1/ The Uniswap Universe is expanding 🦄 In pursuit of our mission to unlock universal ownership and exchange, we’re excited to share that we’ve acquired @geniexyz — the first NFT marketplace aggregator — expanding our products to include both ERC-20s and NFTs 🧞‍♂️

Sounds pretty good on the surface but then I started thinking about it a bit more and I realised there’s a bit more than meets the eye here.

First up, the announcement is very deliberate in mentioning that Labs purchased Genie, not the protocol. Assuming this was a multi deca-million purchase, how did Labs finance the acquisition? Most likely from a funding round. Which funding round? An undisclosed one most likely.

Okay, so if there’s been more rounds of funding then that means the potential pay off for equity holders of labs is going to be even higher in the future. Which leads me to the next point…