Uniswap Labs, the development team behind the decentralized exchange, announced that it has acquired Genie, the world’s first NFT marketplace aggregator.
According to the company’s announcement, acquiring Genie will expand the Uniswap (UNI) ecosystem and integrate both ERC-20 tokens and NFTs into its platform.
“As the world’s largest decentralized exchange protocol, Uniswap is a simple and safe place to access the benefits of digital ownership, offering deeper liquidity than leading centralized exchanges. We’re excited to bring what we’ve learned building DeFi products to NFTs, giving even more people access to digital ownership and value.”
NFTs are coming to Uniswap
The acquisition was made by Uniswap Labs and will have no impact on any part of the Uniswap ecosystem. The company said that neither Uniswap Protocol, Uniswap Governance nor the UNI token will be affected by the acquisition.
Genie users will continue to have uninterrupted access to the Genie website until this fall when the new NFT experience is set to launch. The company didn’t provide any further details as to when they plan on launching the new NFT feature.
To welcome the Genie community into the Uniswap ecosystem, the company will be airdropping USDC to anyone who used Genie more than once before April 15th. The announcement originally said that users holding GENIE:GEM NFTs will also be eligible for the airdrop, but later retracted the information saying that USDC will be airdropped to Genie Genesis NFT holders instead. The airdrop will launch in August and will be claimable for up to 12 months, based on a snapshot that has already been taken.
Throughout the summer, Uniswap Labs will work on integrating NFTs into its developer APIs and widgets. The company said that this will make Uniswap a comprehensive platform for users and builders in Web3.
“This isn’t our first foray into NFTs. In Spring 2019, we launched Unisocks, the first instance of NFT liquidity pools, and of NFTs backed by real-world assets. Our work on Uniswap v3 NFT positions helped pioneer on-chain generative SVGs. We see NFTs as another format for value in the growing digital economy—not a separate ecosystem from ERC20s—and they’re already an important gateway to Web3.”
