This is a guide on how to buy UNI token – the “governance” token of Uniswap. The long-awaited moment has finally arrived. After months of speculation about when Uniswap would release a token, especially after the ‘vampire attack’ of Sushiswap last month, it was only a matter of time. Now it is official – Uniswap has a native governance token, UNI.
UNI has one of the best distribution you could think of – it rewards all past users of Uniswap v1 and Uniswap v2, along with retroactively distributing UNI to liquidity providers. For all the distribution details, you should read their blog post on the same topic.
Update: UNI has caused gas to spike to unprecedented levels. If you are looking to get your transaction through, make sure to read how to set nonce manually in MetaMask and the right gas price estimation for transactions.
How to Farm UNI
Firstly, the team also announced a way to farm UNI tokens, so instead of buying UNI you could simply provide liquidity to a select few Uniswap pools and earn UNI.
As of now, for the first 1 month, there are only 4 pools where you can farm UNI. These liquidity mining UNI incentives are for the following pools:
- ETH/USDT
- ETH/USDC
- ETH/DAI
- ETH/WBTC
5,000,000 UNI will be allocated to each pool above, which comes out to 54 UNI per block per pool. If you want to farm UNI, hurry up and add liquidity to one of these pools, since the amount of liquidity and hence your share of UNI will only go down.
How to Buy UNI
As you might expect, UNI has the most liquidity on Uniswap among the decentralized exchanges (DEXes). This is the UNI-ETH pool to buy UNI with ETH or sell UNI for ETH.
As a general rule, if you are trading UNI, first head over to 1inch to check the prices for the token pair. This is especially true if you want to start from a different token than ETH, say LINK, MKR, BAT, REP, YFI, etc. but even for ETH. 1inch now has private market makers who may be able to give you better prices than Uniswap. If 1inch suggests 100% Uniswap, then head over directly to Uniswap to trade. Otherwise, execute the trade on 1inch.
Also, Binance has already listed UNI. Given the gas prices on Ethereum and the expected increase in gas prices with UNI trades going on in full swing, Binance might just be the more economical option.
In case you’re looking to buy UNI with fiat, you can first get some ETH on Coinbase and then follow the steps above.
Update: Not to be left behind, Coinbase Pro has announced they will start trading UNI as well. You can now simply go to Coinbase and buy UNI