Uniswap Day

Heaven forbid you actually needed to use Ethereum yesterday

I was all ready to take the plunge yesterday and had moved a large portion of my BTC to wBTC. I just needed a bit more ETH to pay the gas fees for the zap into the vault. I set up a tx between my test wallet and my main wallet, with an average gas cost around 119 gwei. Metamask estimated a two minute transaction time, but after five went by I started looking at the gas costs. “Slow” was now 140 gwei. So I resubmitted the transaction. Five more minutes, then gas was up to 175. What the hell was going on?

Things kept escalating over the next hour, reaching 400-500 gwei. Something was happening. Etherscan’s gas tracker showed Uniswap’s router taking about a quarter of the available gas on the network. That wasn’t too unusual, it’d been up there for some time. So I decided to go on Twitter to see what was going on.

It didn’t take long to figure out what was going on. Uniswap had airdropped their governance token, UNI, into the hands of everyone that had used their service. At least four hundred UNI tokens were available to be claimed by everyone who had ever used Uniswap to make a trade, more, I’m sure, went out to LPs. Ethereum was clogged up with people trying to claim the tokens. Binance had already added UNI to their exchange.

Those tokens were worth twelve to fifteen hundred dollars last night, and are currently trading at about a grand. Unfortunately, the cost to claim and swap them is exorbitantly high right now, as gas pices are still well over 600 gwei.

It’s apparent that this trend will continue with Ethereum for the near future, as gas prices continue to rise, forcing small player out of the market. After all, what’s the use of trying to move around <$1000 amounts of ETH or other tokens if you’re paying $100 in gas for the privilege. That said, it will be likely that Ethereum will wind up being the chain for large financial operations, with other, smaller projects being forced off to side chains or competing projects.

With that in mind, I spent some time earlier today doing some research into Polkadot, looking at toward running a validator node, or even doing some smart contract coding on it as well. It’s an interesting project, but the cost of running a validator node and learning Rust will have to go on the backlog for now.

For today, I’m just watching equities markets get crushed and considering whether to buy some more ETHE. It’s holding steady today while everything else tanks, and I don’t have enough that I need to worry about setting stops on my position yet. The premium is sitting at this level, so I may

Crypto markets are mostly green. Haven is back up today, so I’m swapping out to xUSD a bit at a time. I’m still watching CELO, although I don’t have any capital free right now to grab any.

So for now, I’m stuck with transactions in mempool, so I’ll just wait a couple days, and hopefully things will calm down enough for me to get my funds moved into Yearn.

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