A few outliers continue to break through the bearish attitudes looming over the crypto horizon of late. UNI is one of those tokens, with an impressive jump of over 12% in the past 24 hours, investors have flocked to this altcoin in search of a bullish continuation. 

The first quarter of this year brings a lot to the table for investors. Just this month, Uniswap reported that its deployment on Arbitrum led to the swap volume on the latter to jump by a significant amount. The news is also coupled with exciting new info on Uniswap’s latest agenda: the launch of Uniswap v4. 

Arbitrum swap volume has grown more than 4x since this time last year pic.twitter.com/w4iEhKGUty

— Uniswap Labs (@Uniswap) February 16, 2024

What Is Uniswap V4? 

After news that Ethereum, Uniswap’s L1, will have its Dencun upgrade in this year’s first quarter, Uniswap then announced that their latest iteration of the protocol would be launched sometime in Q3 2024. 

Now that the launch of Dencun on Mainnet has been scheduled for March 2024, we’re excited to provide an update to the community!

Uniswap v4’s launch is tentatively set for Q3 2024.

From community-built Hooks (https://t.co/WyaGr1Ti1t), to events, to Twitter Spaces, the…

— Uniswap Foundation (@UniswapFND) February 15, 2024

In essence, Uniswap v4 is a more efficient and cost-effective brother of v3. According to Uniswap’s own website, it is a “non-custodial, non-upgradeable, and permissionless automated market maker protocol.”

In the announcement, v4 is currently in its first phase with the developers finalizing the core functionalities and features of the upgrade. The update would let the team create new features on top of the current AMM design of the protocol. This eliminates the need for creating an entirely new design from the ground up. 

Leading The Innovation Charge

Uniswap is also ramping up its effort in providing funding for innovators in the Web 3 space. Last week, the Uniswap Foundation X account released a detailed look at the organization’s new granting strategy. 

Introducing our Reimagined Grants Strategy

Our vision is simple: to make the @Uniswap Protocol the liquidity layer of the Internet.

As stewards of the Protocol and the Community, we have evolved our grants strategy to turn this vision into reality.

Here’s why and how

— Uniswap Foundation (@UniswapFND) February 7, 2024

In short, the new strategy revolves around granting a minimum of $250,000 in four audience-specific categories: developers, researchers, delegates, and innovation (all stakeholders). 

For now, no date of implementation has been announced for these new grants. 

UNI: Challenging Week Ahead For Investors

The lead-up to the month of March has certainly brought a level of hype around the broader market, but thus hype has since died down and was replaced by profit-taking attitudes. UNI will inevitably experience this bearishness taking hold in the coming weeks as the market potentially dips. 

If this happens, investors and traders have strong support on the 50% and 38.20% price levels. These supports will slow down any bearish advance, stabilizing UNI’s price at the $7.3 and $7 range. 

Featured image from Adobe Stock, chart from TradingView