Coinbase, a San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, has invested 1.1 million USDC in Uniswap, a protocol for automated liquidity on Ethereum, and PoolTogether, a savings game powered by Ethereum.
Coinbase announced the news in a blog post published Wednesday, April 1. According. to the details, the funding was made via the USDC Bootstrap Fund— Coinbase initiative to support developers building DeFi protocols by investing USDC directly in the protocol.
According to the announcement, the USDC Bootstrap Fund has invested 1 million and 100K USDC in Uniswap and PoolTogether respectively. Coinbase said that the funding aimed to facilitate the two protocols’ growth that in return will encourage growth in USDC ecosystem and Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
Coinbase said:
“With USDC, we hope to provide critical infrastructure that will enable DeFi to grow and increasingly compete with existing financial products. In addition to our publicly announced investments in Compound and dYdX, we are proud to announce further investments in Uniswap and PoolTogether.”
Uniswap is a fully decentralized protocol for automated liquidity provision on Ethereum. The Uniswap protocol provides an interface for seamless exchange of ERC20 tokens on Ethereum. Coinbase is putting 1 million USDC into the liquidity pool for USDC/ETH on Uniswap. According to Coinbase, Uniswap is emerging as one of the most liquid exchanges on Ethereum. The company now has grown from $0 to $31 million and has liquidity pools for more than 880 tokens.
At the moment, the V2 of Uniswap protocol is in testnet phase that includes a number of tangible improvements over V1. The V2 is expected to be deployed in mainnet somewhere in Q2 of 2020.
Coinbase has injected 100,000 USDC in PoolTogether which is a no-loss, audited savings game powered by blockchain technology. The company is sponsored by MakerDAO. Basically, PoolTogether is an Ethereum application that makes saving money as fun as a game.
A user buys a ticket by depositing MakerDAO’s stablecoin DAI. All the Dai in the pool earns interest that is generated through Compound protocol that is an algorithmic, autonomous interest rate protocol. At the end of the week one lucky person wins all of the interest earned on DAI.
Coinbase launched the USDC Bootstrap Fund in September of 2019 to help new DeFi protocols to create healthy, liquid marketplaces by leveraging USDC.
The USDC fund is a separate project from Coinbase Ventures, the venture arm of Coinbase which makes traditional equity investments in projects across the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
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