Uniswap v3 has a new front end.
Oku, a user interface designed by the Web3 product-focused GFX Labs, went live on Uniswap v3 on Monday. It’s intended to mesh the user experience of interacting with a centralized exchange with the more complex world of decentralized finance.
Oku’s goal was to deliver “UX that users are accustomed to at Binance and other traditional exchanges, but to DeFi users,” according to Getty Hill, the founder of GFX Labs.
“That means providing order books, price charts, live trading history, limit orders and much more,” Hill told Blockworks.
Unlike other decentralized exchanges, Oku’s interface is designed to showcase all existing and new pools available on Uniswap v3 — and does not require token listing requests.
It provides support for limit orders, meaning users can apply particular conditions to trading pools, lending additional controls to trading strategies.
“The existing DeFi trading interface offered by Uniswap, 1inch, Matcha and others fall well short of the UX most crypto users are used to having,” Hill said. “In order for DeFi to grow, we need to get users to transition from traditional exchanges to DeFi solutions, but they aren’t going to do that if the UX isn’t up to par.”
Funded by the Uniswap Foundation — a non-profit designed to support decentralized growth — Oku is now deployed onto layer-1 networks including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Optimism, with other blockchains upcoming on its expansion roadmap.
Devin Walsh, the executive director at the Uniswap Foundation told Blockworks that due to the mistrust in centralized institutions, Oku’s latest provides a happy medium, marrying the trust and security of the Uniswap Protocol with the speed and trading experience of centralized exchanges.
“The Uniswap Foundation launched in order to fund a diversity of new products on top of the Protocol and to build long term relationships with high caliber teams focused on Uniswap,” Walsh told Blockworks. “Oku represents the best of both – an API and pro interface that fills a gap within the DeFi space, built by a strong team which has been working within the Uniswap ecosystem for years.”