QuickSwap (QUICK) is the native currency of a decentralized exchange of the same name that runs on the layer 2 scaling network, Polygon. QuickSwap is a fork of Uniswap, an automated market maker that is native to Ethereum.

QuickSwap launched in October 2020 through a fair launch – where the vast majority of the tokens were reserved for the community, not the founders or private investors. The team received 3.25% of the initial supply of 1 million QUICK tokens; the community will receive the rest over time. Crypto data provider Messari says this will take about four years. However, since the distribution rate depends on the liquidity users provide to the platform, it is “difficult to generate a reliable supply curve to track the distribution,” according to Messari.

The token rose to $565 after launch, then sank to below $200 until the following spring. Then, in under a week at the end of April 2021, just as bitcoin (BTC) closed in on its all-time high, QUICK rose from $150 to an all-time high of $1,669 on April 30. At the time, that amounted to a market capitalization of $230 million.

QUICK’s price has not risen to such highs since, although due to fluctuations in its circulating supply, its market capitalization peaked at $243.55 million toward the end of August 2021. Both QUICK’s price and market cap faltered as the token limped into 2022.

To kickstart the launch of the network, QuickSwap airdropped 5% of the token supply to holders of Uniswap’s UNI – similar to the launch of SushiSwap, which incentivized Uniswap’s liquidity providers (LP) to jump ship by offering them free UNI.

Ninety percent of the supply of QUICK is allocated to liquidity providers, distributed in the four years after the launch of QuickSwap, although the rate of issuance depends on the total amount of crypto locked up within QuickSwap’s liquidity pools.

QuickSwap is a type of decentralized exchange known as an automated market maker (AMM) protocol. Automated market makers facilitate token swaps by sifting tokens in and out of vast liquidity pools; liquidity providers, who provide token pairings, earn a cut of each trade. AMMs have been around in traditional finance since the end of the last century but were popularized by blockchains as sustainable decentralized alternatives to centralized exchanges.

The most popular automated market maker is Uniswap, which lets users swap tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. However, Ethereum’s space constraints have caused bottlenecks on the blockchain, and scaling solutions like Polygon, on which QuickSwap is based, became popular venues for trading. They let users bridge tokens to a quicker, cheaper blockchain, and do their business before returning to Ethereum. Polygon is one of the largest Ethereum scaling solutions.

As a fork of Uniswap, QuickSwap functions in much the same way, and its user-interface looks very similar, save for a different color scheme. It even supports the same ERC-20 tokens. QuickSwap offers additional features, including limit orders and yield farms, but its liquidity remains a fraction of Uniswap’s.

The QUICK token is an ERC-20 (fungible Ethereum) token. Holders can stake it to earn a cut of QuickSwap’s transaction fees or use it in governance. Community governance is performed off-chain on voting platform Snapshot, and votes are binding.

QuickSwap was founded by Sameep Singhania and Roc Zacharias. According to data from Messari, QuickSwap counts Matic Network (the creators of Polygon) and Lunar Digital Assets as advisors.

It launched four months after the mainnet launch of Polygon. In August 2021, it added support for limit orders – trades that execute after a cryptocurrency has reached a certain price – and “Dragon Syrup,” a yield farming project for QUICK stakers.