Decentralized exchange (DEX), Uniswap (UNI), continues to expand its list of milestones, as its all-time volume on the Ethereum mainnet surged above the $3 trillion figure. This makes it the first DeFi platform to achieve such a metric.
Uniswap surpasses $3 trillion in all-time volume on Ethereum
The $3 trillion figure represents Uniswap’s cumulative swap activity since its launch back in 2018. Since then, the DeFi protocol has survived multiple market cycles, including the DeFi summer of 2020, and the bear market that followed in 2022.
Uniswap is an automated market maker (AMM), which means that it works as a decentralized exchange (DEX) that enables the swap of one token to another, charging a swap fee called slippage.
Since Uniswap’s launch, several other DEXs have tried to compete with it. The toughest competition came from the likes of SushiSwap, Curve, and Balancer, some of the earliest Ethereum-based DEXs.
However, the DEX managed to outperform them all, establishing itself as the go-to DEX on Ethereum. Data from Token Terminal shows that the total value locked (TVL) in Uniswap is currently hovering slightly above $4.5 billion.
To explain, the TVL of a protocol explains the total monetary value of a project’s on-chain deposits and the tokenized value of user deposits made off-chain. It is typically used as a leading indicator of a protocol’s revenue-generation estimates.
A glance at Uniswap’s metrics
Besides the cumulative trading volume reaching beyond the $3 trillion mark, recent trading volumes on Uniswap have been ranging between $1 billion and $2 billion, buoyed by returning interest in memecoin trading and stablecoin inflows.
Further, liquidity depth on Uniswap remains healthy too. Liquidity is majorly concentrated in major trading pairs, such as ETH/USDC and ETH/USDT. To recall, Uniswap v3’s concentrated liquidity model has significantly enhanced the protocol’s capital efficiency.
One metric that may raise some concerns, is the number of active users on the protocol. Fresh data, from Token Terminal, confirms that this particular data point has been on a prolonged decline – falling from 25.2 million in June 2025, to 2.7 million as of today (May 6, 2026).
Despite Uniswap’s success, institutional interest in the overall DeFi space remains weak. Recently, JPMorgan highlighted DeFi hacks and flat TVL as key barriers stopping DeFi’s institutional adoption.