Introduction

UNI is the native token of Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange (DEX) built on the Ethereum network. This analysis will compare the price action of UNI token with three assets:

• ETH, the native token of Ethereum network, currently the number 2 cryptoasset in terms of market cap.

• SUSHI, the native token of Sushiswap, another DEX built on Ethereum

• RUNE, the native token of Thorchain, a multi-chain protocol relying in THORNode operators running a node for each supported blockchain.

Conclusions

There is a clear trend when analysing this data:

For prices of UNI above 13$, all three assets are strongly correlated. This happend in the beginning of January due to the general market downtrend all it affected the 4 tokens similarly. From January 21st onwards, UNI price correlation was stronger with SUSHI and weaker with ETH and RUNE than in the downtrend market.

It makes sense that the price of UNI is more correlated to SUSHI than to ETH or RUNE since UNI and SUSHI are DEXes with a pretty similar use case.

Being an ERC20 token, it also makes sense that UNI and ETH are correlated since UNI is built on Ethereum, but since DEXes are just one use case for Ethereum other factors come into play and can affect ETH price having little influence on UNI.

Lastly, UNI and RUNE also have a common use case, Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges, but RUNE has cross-chain compatibility, having also factors that can affect RUNE price without affecting UNI. Moreover, it looks from last months data that RUNE is having a successfull bull run since increase its price from 3.1$ to 12.1$ in 5 weeks. In that time, UNI went from 9$ to 12$, which can not be compared with (almost 400% vs. 33%).

Methodology

A separate CTE for each token will be created, querying the ethereum.token_prices_hourly with constraints on either the token_address for UNI and SUSHI as found in CMC or the symbol for ETH and RUNE since no address could be found. Data was analysed since January 1st 2022.

This 4 CTEs were joined in sequence to obtain a table with the hourly prices of each of the four tokens in different columns.

Results

Price trends

Figure 1. shows the hourly price since Januarz 1st for all four tokens. There is a general downward trend in all of them until end of February - beginning of March where it started the current upward trend. Although it looks like ETH has a bigger volatility than UNI, it is an effect of the scale.

The one clear thing that can be confirmed is the great bull run from RUNE, increasing more than 3 times its price from February 25th and being the only one with a higher price than at the beginning of the year.

Correlation between tokens

Figures 2. to 4. show the correlation between UNI and ETH, SUSHI and RUNE respectively.

For SUSHI (Figure 3.) there is a strong correlation in one trend, backing up the fact that both are native tokens of an Ethereum-built DEX, Uniswap and Sushiswap respectively.

For ETH, there is a weak correlation between UNI and ETH prices when UNI is below 13$ and a strong correlation when UNI is above 13$. This can be seen as well in Figure 1., from January 1st until 21st, both prices are strongly correlated. From January 21st, the correlation is much weaker and although some peaks and lows are related, the price is not correlated.