1,000 New Token Pairs Added to Uniswap in One Week; Buyers Beware

Leading decentralized exchange Uniswap has added 1,000 new token pairs in the past week – many of questionable quality – as the decentralized finance (DeFi) craze continues unabated.

Since the start of September, Uniswap users have added an average of 150 pairs per day, signalling the popularity of permissionless token creation now possible through the exchange’s token factory, a prominent feature of the decentralized trading platform.
A record high of 221 pairs were created Sunday, according to Dune Analytics.
Exponential growth in the number of tokens and pairs on Uniswap is “a good thing," according to Jack Purdy, decentralized finance analyst at Messari, as it “shows the power of a completely open, permissionless financial primitives."
Uniswap currently supports 8,278 trading pairs, a 90% increase over the past 30 days and nearly 10 times more pairs than Binance, the largest traditional cryptocurrency exchange, which currently supports 838 markets, according to Cryptowatch.
For all of August, Binance announced new listings for only 15 tokens, up from four listings announced a year ago.

Uniswap has reported experienced record-breaking trading volume for the past four months, as CoinDesk previously reported, even though only four tokens — SushiToken, USDC, tether, and wrapped ether — report 24-hour trading volume greater than $50 million.
Of course, without gatekeepers to approve or deny new listings, the exchange platforms will almost inevitably support “a lot of worthless tokens or outright scams purporting to be something they’re not,” Purdy told CoinDesk. Users are therefore responsible for creating tools on their own that protect against these fraudulent tokens, he added.
Demonstrating the complete permissionlessness of token listings on Uniswap, one user listed the “Uniswap Exchange Token” Wednesday afternoon, a token believed to be fake and not created by the Uniswap team.

Uniswap-listed pairs compared to the largest traditional exchanges by number of active markets

Uniswap did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment on the newly listed "Uniswap" token, nor to a request for comment on the exponential growth in trading pairs listed on the exchange.
However, in a blog post in late August, the Uniswap team acknowledged the problem its own permissionless system was helping create. “As the rate of token issuance accelerates, it has become increasingly difficult for users to filter out high quality, legitimate tokens from scams, fakes, and duplicates,” the Uniswap team wrote, adding that the trend is something “we expect will only accelerate in the future.”

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Zack Voell

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