Traders have shifted their focus to Uniswap’s UNI token following a multi-million dollar exploit of Curve Finance, a stablecoin-focused decentralized exchange (DEX). According to Matrixport, funding rates in perpetual futures tied to UNI have surged to an annualized 19%, indicating that traders are holding leveraged buy positions and are willing to pay funding to shorts to keep their positions open. The UNI token [perpetuals] trades at a nearly 20% premium as traders expect Uniswap to gain even more market share after the CRV exploit, said Markus Thielen, head of research and strategy at Matrixport.
The attack on Curve caused its native CRV token to drop 15% to $0.63, introducing additional risk and potentially threatening to liquidate $70 million worth of borrowed positions of Curve founder. Despite this, the perpetual futures market shows no signs of panic, with funding rates in CRV and AAVE markets remaining above zero. Thielen noted that CRV DAO perp futures are still trading at a small premium, indicating that traders are more focused on moving positions away from the DEX (regarding TVL) rather than shorting the token.
Data from DeFiLlama shows that the total value locked (TVL) in Curve Finance fell from $3.2 billion to $1.8 billion following the hack, while Uniswap’s TVL has held steady at around $3.8 billion and AAVE’s has declined from $5.85 billion to $5.37 billion.