Scorching Uniswap races to record

Uniswap (UNI) crossed $13 earlier today, a new record high. As of 8:30 a.m. (EST), UNI was $12.70, rising 6% in the last 24 hours.

Once on the verge of getting black holed – but now the sun in the decentralized exchange solar system – UNI is expanding rapidly. It accounts for more than half of the market share across the DEX space (CryptoBriefing).

Just in the past few weeks, UNI has improved scalability, cementing intense loyalty in its growing community of Liquidity Providers (LPs).

Not long after it was born this summer, the UNI protocol became preyed upon by SushiSwap. This past November, the protocol again appeared vulnerable after a liquidity-incentives program ended, triggering a flash drought. And yet UNI now has $3.4 billion worth of liquidity courtesy of more than 72,000 LPs.

One lone, dead-flat stablecoin. Other than that (and UNI), there’s nary a smidgen of green visible in the heat maps and charts we perused at dawn, fitting for the dead of winter: BTC, down; its forks, down; ETH, down; its challengers, down; digital silver to digital gold, that's down too. Even some DeFi scorchers have cooled.

Chainlink hit an all-time high yesterday, about $25.60. As of early Tuesday (EST), LINK was 10% off that mark.

Some university endowments have amassed some Bitcoin on the sly but most institutional investors seem content to sit back until regulatory marshals bring order to a crypto industry perceived as the Wild West.

Investors always have to be mentally prepared for a Bitcoin crash, said CNBC’s James Ledbetter.

If that’s the nature of the beast, then best to keep such a creature in its cage, say many Wall Street firms, concerned about volatility (The Daily Chain).

Crypto-centered companies once painted as forward thinkers are now seen as froth indicators, said Bloomberg, noting the purchase of $150 million worth of BTC by crypto mining firm Marathon Patent Group. Cautionary posturing also owes to retail investors blindly flooding into crypto, as evidenced by crazy markups in obviously inaccurately priced vehicles such as the $166 million Grayscale Litecoin Trust.

LTCN is currently trading at about a 2,275% premium to LTC.

Ripple says RippleNet had record volume growth in 2020, processing nearly 3 million transactions. That’s almost five times the growth seen in 2019.

An increasing demand for digital financial services and payments interoperability in Asia is propelling the adoption of RippleNet, according to a published statement by the San Francisco-based blockchain services provider which is battling U.S. regulators over the status of XRP, the digital asset associated with Ripple.

A quick check of XRP at around 8:30 a.m. (EST) showed it was $0.26347, down roughly 3% over the past 24 hours.

A crypto/car buff has decked out the trunk of his BMV i8 hybrid with a mini-mining rig comprising six GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards. They’re powered by an ASUS B250 Mining Expert board and an EVGA SuperNOVA 1600 T2 power supply. The vehicle is reportedly capable of mining BTC and ETH (Hardware Times).

Dissident Garners Digital Donations: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arch rival, Alexey Navalny, has received 657 BTC from supporters over the past few years. The pace of donations accelerated last week after authorities in Moscow arrested the fearless dissident.