Uniswap Price

Uniswap is a decentralised exchange that replaced the order book with a formula. Instead of matching buyers with sellers, it holds pools of two assets and prices trades according to their ratio, so a trade can always execute against the pool without anyone on the other side.

Anyone can supply liquidity to a pool and earn a share of trading fees. Anyone can create a market for any pair of tokens without permission or listing approval. Hayden Adams founded Uniswap Labs, which builds the protocol.

The protocol itself is a set of non-upgradable smart contracts on Ethereum. Each version, once deployed, runs indefinitely — no operator can pause it, alter its terms or seize funds. This is the property that distinguishes it from a centralised exchange, and it is architectural rather than promised.

Version 3 introduced concentrated liquidity, letting providers commit capital to a chosen price range rather than spreading it across every possible price. Capital efficiency improved substantially, at the cost of requiring providers to think about where they place liquidity and to manage positions that can drift out of range.

Version 4, announced in 2023, changed the underlying structure. All pools now live in a single contract rather than being deployed individually, cutting the gas cost of creating a pool by around ninety-nine percent. It also introduced hooks — custom code that runs at defined points in a pool's lifecycle, allowing limit orders, dynamic fees and custom oracles to be built into pools themselves.

UNI is a governance token, not a claim on protocol revenue. One billion were minted at launch in September 2020, distributed to community, team, investors and advisors over four years, after which a perpetual two percent annual inflation begins. Holders vote on proposals through an on-chain governance system.