Uniswap Volume Leapfrogs Coinbase Thanks to Pepe and Meme Coins

Amid the craze generated by Pepecoin (PEPE), which saw its market cap surpass the $1 billion mark last week, decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap overtook Coinbase in daily volume over the past few days. 

The DEX first pulled even on May 4th, when both exchanges saw approximately $1.2 billion in volume according to DeFi Llama and CoinGecko. 

It’s worth nothing that Uniswap, as a protocol, has three different versions across six different blockchains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Meanwhile, Coinbase supports Ethereum and all EVM-compatible networks. 

The difference in volume continued to rise the next day, with Uniswap seeing $2.2 billion on May 5 compared to Coinbase’s $1.3 billion. As of this writing, Uniswap still looked to be slightly ahead of Coinbase, with $1.2 billion volume compared to the San Francisco-based exchange’s $948 million.  

Despite the possibility that trading volume over the past few days seems to be fuelled by the meme coin hype, both platforms have been engaged in fierce competition for second place in trading volume since last year. 

This isn’t the first time Uniswap has beat Coinbase on volume. It happened several times in 2022, especially after the collapse of FTX in November drove traders away from centralized exchanges.

This year has also been quite positive for Uniswap, which saw two months in a row–February and March–of higher trading volume than its centralized competitor. 

Coinbase sits at second place for centralized cryptocurrency exchange volumes, whereas Uniswap is the premier decentralized trading spot for users, quadrupling its closest competitor, PancakeSwap over the past seven days, according to information from Dune. 

In March, Uniswap saw almost $73 billion in monthly trading volume. The DEX accounted for 61% of all DeFi trading over the past 7 days, according to the Dune dashboard.

While Uniswap and Coinbase duke it out for second, Binance continues to enjoy an unrivaled first place, with nearly 7 times the trading volume on both aforementioned platforms, as shown on Coingecko.