Uniswap

The profile

Automated market maker created on Ethereum on 2 November 2018 by Hayden Adams, which replaces an order book with pooled liquidity whose price moves as traders swap against it; v3 introduced concentrated liquidity and v4 a singleton pool contract with hooks. UNI holders executed the UNIfication proposal on 28 December 2025 by 125.3m votes to 742, switching on a 0.05% protocol fee on v2 pools while cutting the liquidity provider share from 0.30% to 0.25%, taking between a sixth and a quarter of provider fees on v3 tiers, routing the proceeds to a contract that can only be emptied by burning UNI, and burning 100m UNI from the treasury outright. Having processed roughly $4tn of cumulative volume by that vote, the protocol became a case study in whether an onchain venue can charge rent without losing order flow, since fees are visible to every user and forking the code is permitted.