Uniswap founder Hayden Adams rejected claims on July 28 that the decentralized exchange’s newly activated v4 protocol fees reduce liquidity providers’ existing earnings.
Summary
- Uniswap governance activated v4 protocol fees across seven chains after 46.6 million UNI supported proposal.
- Liquidity providers retain existing pool fees while traders pay a separate protocol charge, Adams said.
- A 30-basis-point pool adds five basis points, making the protocol fee 14% of total fees.
He said critics had misunderstood how the charge is calculated after governance approved the change.
The response followed the execution of Proposal 100 on July 27. The vote received 46.6 million UNI in support and 1.27 million against, clearing the 40 million UNI quorum. It activated the fee-controller system on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Polygon, OP Mainnet and Robinhood Chain.
Uniswap v4 fees are additive under the new design
Adams used a pool charging traders 30 basis points as his example. Under the approved curve, LPs continue earning 30 basis points, while the protocol adds five basis points. Traders therefore pay a combined fee near 35 basis points. The protocol’s five-basis-point portion equals about 14% of that total, not 25% of the LP fee stream.
Uniswap v4’s published code supports that distinction. The Pool contract describes the total swap charge as the LP fee plus the protocol fee. It calculates the protocol amount separately and routes the remaining fee growth to liquidity providers. The exact charge varies because v4 supports hooks and dynamic pool fees.
In addition, the proposal created a V4FeePolicy contract to classify pools and calculate charges, alongside a V4FeeAdapter that applies governance rules and sends collected assets to TokenJar contracts. For ordinary static pools, the policy uses a curve tied to the LP fee. Aggregator-hook pools use separate fixed rates.
Not every participant accepted the design. Panoptic founder Guillaume Lambert argued during the governance discussion that taking 10% to 25% of fees could weaken LP returns and push capital toward competing automated market makers. He called for protocol charges to depend on whether LP positions were already profitable. That criticism treated the charge as a reduction to LP income, while Adams’ response focused on v4’s additive implementation.
Adams also criticised a rival Uniswap fork that routes all swap fees away from LPs and uses token emissions allocated through voting to compensate them. He did not name the protocol in the July 28 post. His comparison was separate from the technical question of how Uniswap v4 divides fees.
Uniswap says previous fees did not drive liquidity away
Uniswap Labs said earlier fee activations on v2 and v3 had not produced a broad liquidity exit. Its July 18 governance response said Ethereum’s 25 largest fee-enabled v3 pools retained 98.5% of their pre-activation liquidity in token terms. It also said protocol fees funded about 7.5 million UNI in burns since December.
Those figures came from Uniswap Labs and have not yet established how v4 providers will respond. V4 pools can use customised hooks, dynamic pricing and different strategies, so their economics are not identical to v3. Labs said governance could submit another proposal to adjust rates if the new charges were not well tolerated.
DefiLlama listed Uniswap’s combined total value locked at about $3.06 billion on July 29. The dashboard also showed $88.4 million in gross fees over 30 days and about $3.36 million in protocol revenue. Those totals cover multiple Uniswap versions and chains rather than only the newly activated v4 pools.
More v4 fee activation and monitoring comes next
Fees collected through the new system move into TokenJar contracts. Searchers can claim those assets by providing and burning UNI through the protocol’s Firepit mechanism. Fees generated on supported layer-2 networks are connected to burns on Ethereum mainnet.
As crypto.news previously reported, the broader UNIfication programme began with a 100 million UNI treasury burn and protocol-fee collection across v2 and v3 deployments. In related coverage, crypto.news examined how Robinhood Chain activity increased Uniswap’s fee base before the v4 vote.
The executed proposal covers the first group of v4 deployments. Its text says Celo, Soneium, World Chain, X Layer and Zora require a later proposal because Uniswap’s governance contract limits the number of executable actions in one vote. No filing date has been announced for that second vote.
The next measurable test will be whether affected pools retain liquidity and trading volume after the charges begin accumulating. Governance can change individual pool overrides, fee-family rules or the underlying policy contract. Adams’ post settles the intended fee arithmetic, but LP behaviour will determine whether the model remains competitive.
