Uniswap Launches Governance Token to Keep Up With Rival

Decentralized trading platform Uniswap has launched a governance token, UNI, minting 1 billion coins to be released to the public over the next four years.

Announced Wednesday night, the new token will be allocated to Uniswap community members, team members/future employees, investors and advisers.

"UNI officially enshrines Uniswap as publicly-owned and self-sustainable infrastructure while continuing to carefully protect its indestructible and autonomous qualities," the firm wrote.

The move comes just a week after Uniswap competitor SushiSwap migrated over $800 million in crypto assets from its rival.

Of the two automated market makers, the newer SushiSwap had been cast as the more "Decentralized" of the pair.

SushiSwap launched with a token to enable liquidity mining, and incentivized users to load up on assets prior to the migration to maximize their potential rewards when SushiSwap went fully live.

Uniswap will launch a liquidity mining program on Sept. 18, targeting its USDT, USDC, DAI and wBTC pools.

While the blog post said Uniswap "Team members will not participate directly in governance for the foreseeable future," it noted that team members could delegate votes to protocol delegates, and all UNI holders will have ownership of the governance process.

Tokens dedicated to employees, investors and advisors have a four-year vesting schedule.

"A community-managed treasury opens up a world of infinite possibilities," the blog post said.