From Genie to Uniswap NFT: Casual or Ambitious?

Author: Cookie, BlockBeats

After nearly half a year of waiting, Genie has finally brought "Pork Rice" to the forefront of NFT veterans. This late but kind "Pork Rice" is available to anyone who completed two transactions using Genie before 8 a.m. Beijing time on April 15th this year, and they can receive 300 USDC. Holders of Genie: Genesis NFT can receive 1000 USDC.

Connect the wallet that meets the airdrop requirements on the Uniswap official website to claim the USDC airdrop directly.

Most airdrops are designed to attract more traffic, such as Blur, a competitor in the same field, which not only attracted attention during the first airdrop, but also quickly announced the second airdrop to be distributed next Monday after the Genie airdrop yesterday, which will be 10 times larger than the first round. However, Genie's airdrop is more like a farewell "thank you" at the end.

As the first NFT aggregator, Genie gradually fell silent since its acquisition by Uniswap in June. When this airdrop once again brought Genie to the attention of the market, Genie had quietly closed its doors and no longer existed as an independent brand - opening Genie's official website will automatically redirect to Uniswap's NFT page.

If we simply evaluate Uniswap NFT as an "NFT aggregator", this product is disappointing - it is almost indistinguishable from Genie before, as if the team has been asleep for nearly half a year, giving people a "careless" feeling. The overall interface looks similar to Gem, but it appears more concise because it lacks the comprehensive features of Gem.

Comparison of home page dashboards, with Gem shown in the top image and Uniswap NFT shown in the bottom image. It can be seen that Uniswap NFT lacks three dashboards: "Position Project List", "Sweeping Monitoring", and "Mint Monitoring", but has a small feature to switch the pricing unit to USD.

Nowadays, NFT aggregators almost always require a data dashboard, but Uniswap NFT is completely lacking in data presentation. Apart from the single dashboard on the homepage, there are no data analysis charts to be found when clicking into project details.

Comparison of project details page, the top picture is Gem, and the bottom picture is Uniswap NFT. Don't you want to remind Uniswap: Hey, you're not making a market, you're making an aggregator!

The entrance to view/list your own NFTs is located in the wallet details, and there is a slight disconnect in its usage. In addition to these intuitive user experiences, Uniswap's own description of product advantages can also be a bit confusing.

"Better prices, more options for sale. Isn't this what an aggregator should do?"

However, what Uniswap wants to do is not just a simple "NFT aggregator". What they really want to do is a "seamless ecosystem for trading FT and NFT". In this concept, the NFT aggregator is more of a "user experience optimization" rather than a "transaction efficiency optimization tool" that meets the current needs of NFT players.

Uniswap's next-generation router, "Universal Router," can complete the process shown in the following figure in a single transaction:

If you have 100 USDC, 0.1 ETH, and 250 DAI, you can convert all three tokens to WETH in one transaction and complete the NFT purchase.

From a user experience perspective, you can use any FT with liquidity on Uniswap to purchase NFTs, such as buying a BAYC with SHIB in just one transaction, which sounds quite smooth. Moreover, the "Universal Router" optimizes gas consumption, and according to Uniswap's official statement, the gas consumption of Uniswap NFTs is reduced by 15% compared to other NFT aggregators.

Uniswap NFT provides a better pricing option at the end of this "one-stop-shop" process. The aggregator's positioning change is a "bigger ambition" behind the "carefree" attitude, not to break through the increasingly smaller group of NFT players, but to provide a more complete and convenient user experience for its already large user base - between different tokens in FT and between FT and NFT.

Genie has completely integrated into the Uniswap ecosystem and quietly withdrew from the "NFT aggregator" track that is still in fierce competition. Functionally, it is still the same Genie, but in terms of development direction, it no longer has such a direct competitive relationship with Gem, which is struggling to resist the Blur attack under OpenSea, and Blur, which is trying to regain NFT market share through aggregators. Although Genie's final airdrop call did not bring back the hearts of NFT players-after all, this product is really outdated from the perspective of "NFT aggregator". But if you are an airdrop recipient and miss this "old-fashioned taste", it is still worth going back to experience it, in addition to nostalgia, there is also a gas reduction benefit (gas is not more than 0.01 ETH, free gas, and if it exceeds, 0.01 ETH will be refunded). As for the future of Uniswap NFT, I am not very optimistic. Let us see if it can create some miracles with the changes in product iteration and market conditions.

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia