Ethereum’s Pending Transactions Jump 30% After Uniswap’s Token Claim Begins

The number of pending transactions on Ethereum per minute jumped 30% after the claim for Uniswap's UNI token began.

The decentralized trading platform announced around 00:30 UTC time Thursday it launched its governance token, dubbed UNI, with 1 billion coins that will be released over the next four years.

While the liquidity mining for the governance token will not start until Friday, Uniswap said historical users and liquidity providers on the platform are now able to claim for 400 UNI per each address.

"15% of UNI [150,000,000 UNI] can immediately be claimed by historical liquidity providers, users, and SOCKS redeemers/holders based on a snapshot ending Sept. 1, 2020, at 12:00 am UTC," Uniswap said in a blog post.

Following the announcement, the number of pending transactions on the Ethereum network per minute has jumped from around 160,000 to over 210,000 as of writing, according to data on blockchain explorer Etherscan.

Within three hours after the claim started, over 18,000 transactions were sent to the smart contract address of the UNI governance token, with more than 5,000 of them pending at the time. The total number of transactions has now reached over 26,000 while the pending ones have dropped to around 3,700 as of writing.

The increasing number of transactions sent to the UNI smart contract appears to have led to a surge of the gas fee on the Ethereum network, which Uniswap's protocol is built on.

The current average gas fee on Ethereum has reached 650 Gwei, compared to the average 152 Gwei on Wednesday UTC time, based on Etherscan's data.

In fact, the UNI token's smart contract address is now ranking third in terms of the overall transaction fees in the past three hours, with a total of 534 ETH worth over $200,000 as of writing, according to Etherscan.

Even the site traffic on the blockchain explorer has reached a peak. "The last time Etherscan site traffic peak to the current level was during the 2017-2018 ICO mania. Kudos to Uniswap for the successful launch of the UNI token," said Etherscan's founder and CEO Matthew Tan in a tweet.

Within hours of Uniswap's announcement, major centralized exchanges including Binance, Huobi and OKEx listed trading pairs for the governance token, which is now changing hands at around $2.90.