SushiSwap and Bancor Get a Boost from $1.5 Billion Uniswap Exodus

Over $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency collateral has been shifted over the past few days as Uniswap’s farming incentives came to an end on Nov 17. The DeFi protocol did very little to prevent the largely anticipated exodus of liquidity and now its rivals are benefiting. From a record $3 billion in liquidity last week, Uniswap has been hemorrhaging so much that it has slumped by 53% to around $1.4 billion today.

From Uniswap to SushiSwap

It appears that Uniswap fork and rival protocol SushiSwap is getting the lion’s share of this billion-dollar river of crypto collateral. According to DeFi Pulse, SushiSwap total value locked has surged by 300% over the past couple of days to top out at over $1 billion. This has propelled the protocol up to sixth place on the total value locked (TVL) charts, flipping Curve Finance, Synthetix, and Yearn Finance.

Maker is back at the top of the pile with $2.4 billion locked up while wrapped Bitcoin and Compound Finance are second and third respectively. The other DeFi protocol getting a good share of that liquidity is Balancer which has seen a 27% increase in TVL over the past day or so. Commenting in the latest Defiant Newsletter, industry insider Cooper Turley stated;

“Other projects are now looking to siphon off yield-hungry traders by offering incentives of their own, best highlighted by SushiSwap boosting SUSHI rewards and Bancor’s BNT liquidity mining released yesterday.”

Bancor TVL has surged 50% over the past 24 hours but it is still a small fry compared to its billion-dollar brethren. The total across the industry is just off its all-time high at $13.7 billion according to DeFi Pulse.

Uniswap Community Vote Update

Uniswap community members expressed their concerns about the premise of a mass exodus in a recent community call but core team members remained tight-lipped. Governance came too little too late and an ongoing ‘temperature check’ vote and proposal has not mitigated the migration of money. At the time of press, the three-day vote was a close call with 51.9% supporting the proposal to continue farming incentives for another two months and 47.7% voting against it. UNI prices meanwhile have been holding steady over the past 24 hours with little change, trading at just below $3.70.