Over the weekend, Uniswap and Curve, which are decentralized exchanges (DEX), experienced their highest trading volumes ever. Traders were particularly interested in exchanging USD Coin (USDC). Uniswap alone processed nearly $12 billion worth of trades within a 24-hour window between Saturday and Sunday. DEXs don't rely on intermediaries but use smart contracts to offer financial services such as lending, borrowing, and trading to users. Users supply tokens to liquidity pools, which then reward them with a portion of fees paid by traders who use the platform.
According to Dune Analytics, over a seven-day period, USDC pools for wrapped ether (WETH), tether (USDT), and dai (DAI) processed $15 billion in trading volume, with the majority occurring between Friday and Sunday. This generated over $8 million in fees for Uniswap, which was then distributed between Uniswap Labs and liquidity providers. Meanwhile, Curve recorded almost $8 billion in trading volume, with one of its pools experiencing an imbalance as traders hurried to exchange USDC for other tokens. Circle Internet Financial's USDC stablecoin experienced a significant drop in value after regulatory action against Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which held over $3.3 billion in Circle's treasury assets.
This sparked a weekend sell-off that saw bitcoin briefly dip below $19,200. However, BTC and ETH rebounded by 10% within the past 24 hours to recoup all of their weekend losses. This happened after Circle announced it would cover the reserves shortfall and regulators assured SVB depositors would have access to their funds on Monday.