13,000 DeFi users have already claimed Uniswap's new UNI token

Decentralized finance platform Uniswap's governance protocol token UNI went live on Ethereum earlier today.

The community showed immediate support for the new token with Uniswap's Twitter announcement garnering over 1.2 thousand likes in the first 90 minutes.

150 million UNI, or 15% of the token's supply, is now available to be claimed by anyone who has used the platform.

With the news going viral, 13,000 Uniswap users had already claimed their 400 free tokens in the first three hours - not surprising given that number of tokens is valued at $1,344 per user at the current price.

The mad rush for tokens saw the Ethereum network slow to a crawl and fees skyrocket with $650,000 spent on Uniswap and UNI gas fees alone in three hours.

Binance quickly announced it would list the UNI token around 60 minutes after Uniswap's official announcement.

The token will have an inflation rate of 2% annually.

The 150,000,000 UNI tokens being released immediately are being distributed to "Historical liquidity providers, users, and SOCKS redeemers/holders" based on a snapshot taken on Sep 1.

In the initial governance stages, any token holder can submit a governance proposal, if they delegate 10,000,000 UNI tokens, or 1% of the total UNI supply.

As of the time of press, there are 13,314 addresses holding UNI tokens with over 44,000 transactions already confirmed - that is on average 4 transactions per second since the announcement.