Key Takeaways
- The popular DeFi exchange Uniswap has been deployed to the carbon-negative Proof-of-Stake blockchain Celo.
- By leveraging Celo, Uniswap will create “green asset liquidity pools” that make use of tokenized carbon credits.
- The decision will also provide Uniswap users with $10 million in financial incentives and help Uniswap reach mobile users.
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The popular DeFi exchange Uniswap has been deployed to Celo following a community vote that concluded Apr. 29.
Vote Succeeds Almost Unanimously
This week’s vote was overwhelmingly in support of deploying Uniswap on Celo, with 99.7% of votes favoring the decision.
The remaining 0.3% votes abstained entirely. There were virtually zero votes directly opposed to launching on Celo.
Nearly 500 addresses participated in the vote. The largest was the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz (a16z), which had 1.35% of the voting power with 13.5 million votes.
Various academic institutions were also involved. Blockchain at Michigan was responsible for the initial proposal and took part in the vote. Blockchain groups at UCLA, UC Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University all took part.
Those votes from university blockchain groups represented 1.7% of all votes—or 17.2 million votes in absolute terms.
Celo Will Provide Green Features
Though Uniswap is primarily an exchange for Ethereum-based assets, it has also been ported to various other platforms compatible with Ethereum, such as Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
The notion of adding Uniswap to Celo has been under consideration since March, with various reasons cited in the proposal.
One of the primary motivations was Celo’s energy efficiency. Celo is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that is carbon negative due to an offset fund. Uniswap aims to take advantage of this by using tokenized carbon credits to create “green asset liquidity pools.”
The proposal will also see Celo rebalance its reserve with green assets without the need to rely on centralized exchanges.
On the user end, the proposal will provide Uniswap users with $10 million in financial incentives, funded by grants from the Celo Foundation. Celo’s mobile-first approach will also help Uniswap target its platform at 6 billion smartphone users.
With $7 billion in locked value, Uniswap is currently the fifth-largest DeFi platform, according to data from DeFiPulse.
Celo, meanwhile, is a relatively minor blockchain. Its native asset, CELO, has a market cap of $1.1 billion, placing it among the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by that measure.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies.
