What's Driving Token Prices? April 17, 2024

UNI (-37%) - Uniswap, the top decentralized exchange, was frequently in the headlines this past week starting with an announcement that the company received Wells Notice from the SEC. For those unfamiliar with the concept, A Wells notice is a letter that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sends to people or firms at the conclusion of an SEC investigation that states the SEC is planning to bring an enforcement action against them. Hayden Adams, Uniswap’s founder, quickly communicated the news to the public causing many to believe this could hurt Uniswap’s future business opportunities. Hours after the announcement, Uniswap Labs quietly raised its fees for using Uniswap’s front-end interface from 0.15% to 0.25%. But, on a more positive note, Uniswap announced it is collaborating with the interoperability project, Across Protocol, to create a new cross-chain ERC20 standard for cross-chain swaps.
LINK (-22%) - Last week Chainlink, a decentralized oracle project, launched "Transporter", an app that moves tokens and messages via its CCIP protocol. The app supports transfers and messages between Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon. Chainlink, which launched in 2019, has largely focused on providing off-chain data to on-chain products (oracle services) but has recently expanded to interoperability solutions, creating its Cross Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
GMT (-18%)—StepN, a Move—to—earn game, announced a partnership with Adidas on Monday to issue Adidas-branded collectibles through the game. StepN grew in popularity in early 2022 with its move-to-earn game, which rewarded users for taking walks and being active. As part of the partnership, StepN will raffle off co-branded Genesis Sneakers (NFT assets).
TAO (-16%) - Bittensor, a decentralized version of OpenAI, was listed on both Binance and Crypto.com last week thus opening up access to an asset that was previously difficult to acquire. Bittensor (TAO) uses tokenization to incentivize machine learning models to join its network and provide AI services to end applications. The network has expanded rapidly in the past year as use cases for AI have exploded. The company now boasts several applications including a ChatGPT replacement, an image manipulation and generation application, and a proprietary trading network.

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