The price of UNI, the native governance token for Uniswap, jumped more than 14% in the 24 hours before Uniswap Labs officially announced on Thursday morning at 9 a.m. ET that it was launching a new L2 network, prompting speculation that at least some traders had information about the news ahead of time and had traded on it. Over the same time period, the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap each dropped between 2% to 3%.
One significant piece of evidence for the speculation was a tweet from Joseph Delong, CTO of lending protocol Astaria, at 12:58 a.m ET Thursday, strongly implying that the announcement from the world’s largest decentralized exchange was coming. In his post, Delong shared a screenshot of a 2022 article written by venture capitalist Dan Elitzer arguing that a Unichain L2 was inevitable. “Someone should accuse Dan of being a time traveler,” Delong commented.
The announcement about Unichain was also sent ahead of time on embargo to some news outlets, including Unchained. And crypto publication Bankless published a podcast about the news two hours before the official announcement.
Read More: Uniswap Labs Announces New Unichain Layer 2 to Improve the Fragmented DeFi Experience
Noted crypto security expert Ogle told Unchained that UNI’s rise appeared to be a clear case of people with advance information trading on the news.
“Any time a big thing happens at any company, crypto or not, people need to know about it to prepare. Almost invariably at least some of those people leak the info. So almost certainly that happened here and will almost always happen,” Ogle said. “The difference is that in crypto the markets are relatively illiquid, and the mouths are relatively free-flowing. So you end up with 12% gains before announcements.”
A spokesperson for Uniswap Labs denied the possibility that any trading in UNI prior to the announcement could have been carried out by employees of the firm. “In an abundance of caution, Uniswap Labs implemented a trading restriction on UNI for its employees prior to the Unichain announcement,” the spokesperson said.
Data from Etherscan and Nansen also showed some significant trades involving UNI in the time leading up to the announcement. farmertaiki.eth (0x98e) which has an overall balance exceeding $1 million, swapped $350,000 of USDC for UNI roughly an hour prior to Delong’s post on X was published. And a different address (0x1666), which has the ENS findnemo.eth and consistently interacts with staking pools, swapped $50,000 USDC for 6,443 UNI tokens at 8 a.m. Thursday, according to Nansen.
