What happened
Cryptocurrency Uniswap (UNI 0.24%) charged sharply higher Thursday, surging by as much as 11.5%. As of 11:42 a.m., the altcoin was still up 11.4% over the past 24 hours.
The popular decentralized exchange was deployed on Polygon's (MATIC +0.00%) network, expanding its availability to more retail traders.
So what
Uniswap revealed that all three of its version 3 contracts are now live on the Polygon network. The announcement came after holders of the UNI token overwhelmingly approved a governance proposal supporting the move.
Image source: Getty Images.
Polygon co-founder Mihailo Bjelic had proposed the deal to the UNI community, and holders of more than 72 million tokens voted in favor of the move, compared to about 503,000 tokens against.
In a statement, Bjelic reflected on the deployment:
Ethereum (ETH 0.12%) introduced a noble vision of an open, borderless economic system accessible to everyone. With the increased usage, fees on Ethereum layer 1 have effectively "priced out" most of the users. With this deployment, Uniswap as the flagship Ethereum application returns back to the original vision and again offers low fees and open access to everyone.
Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange in terms of trading volume, allowing users to trade coins among themselves. By using algorithms to calculate prices and liquidity pools to support transactions, it negates some of the problems of finding buyers for tokens with lower trading volumes.
Now what
Polygon's layer 2 blockchain runs on top of Ethereum (ETH 0.12%) as a scaling platform, and has been central to efforts to lower "gas prices" and reduce congestion on the popular Ethereum network, with its ability to connect with a growing array of blockchains.
The deployment on Polygon is just the latest move by Uniswap to increase its utility. The altcoin has already been deployed on companion systems Arbitrum and Optimism.
Polygon has also benefited from the addition of Uniswap to its network, which helped push its MATIC token to an all-time high of $2.71 over the past 24 hours. MATIC has gained more than 65% in the month since the deal was proposed.
