Uniswap

There are three separate things called Uniswap, and most confusion comes from mixing them up. The protocol is the pool contracts on Ethereum and other chains. Uniswap Labs is the company, legally Universal Navigation Inc., that wrote those contracts and runs the app at app.uniswap.org, the mobile wallet and the browser extension. UNI governance is the token-holder system that controls the protocol's fee settings and treasury.

Hayden Adams, a former mechanical engineer at Siemens, deployed the first version on 2 November 2018 and still runs Labs as CEO. The company had raised about $165 million by 2022 from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Paradigm and Union Square Ventures (Wikipedia). It is hiring: in September 2026 its careers page listed open engineering, design and ecosystem roles.

The line between Labs and governance moved twice in 2025. In September the DAO wrapped itself in DUNI, a Wyoming DUNA, so it can sign contracts and pay taxes without exposing voters to personal liability. In December the UNIfication package moved most Uniswap Foundation staff into Labs, left a smaller grants team at the Foundation, and gave Labs a growth budget of 20 million UNI a year, paid quarterly from 1 January 2026 (Uniswap Labs).

Governance cannot touch your pool position. It can switch protocol fees on or off per pool and spend the treasury. The pool contracts themselves have no admin key that moves user funds.

Each version is a new set of contracts, not an upgrade. Old versions keep running, which is why v2 still holds about $1 billion of liquidity in 2026 alongside v3 and v4 (DefiLlama).

The big practical jump was v3. Instead of spreading liquidity from zero to infinity, LPs pick a price range. That makes trades cheaper for swappers and turns LPing into active management: if the price leaves your range, you stop earning and end up holding only one of the two tokens (Uniswap Labs).

v4 hooks are external contracts attached to a pool that can run code before and after swaps, liquidity changes and donations (Uniswap docs). They allow things like dynamic fees and on-chain limit orders. They also mean a v4 pool is only as safe as its hook. The v4 core is audited; a random hook deployed by a stranger is not.

A swap costs the pool's fee tier plus network gas, plus any fee added by the front end you use. Until December 2025 the entire pool fee went to liquidity providers. UNIfication kept the swapper's price the same and cut the LP share, sending the difference to a burn mechanism for UNI (Uniswap Labs).

The switch started with v2 and selected v3 pools on Ethereum mainnet, which Labs said covered 80–95% of LP fees there. Governance proposal 100 in July 2026 extended it to v4 pools on seven networks, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and BNB Chain (Bitget News). Labs also set its own interface, wallet and API fees to zero as part of the same deal.

On Ethereum mainnet, gas is still the fee that decides small trades. The pool fee on a $200 swap in a 0.05% pool is ten cents, while gas can cost more than that. For small amounts, the same pools on an L2 are the cheaper route. The Uniswap card scores cost against other DEXs.

At the contract level, the record is long and clean. The v2, v3 and v4 pool contracts have held billions since 2020 without a protocol-layer exploit, and no admin key can move pooled funds. The one drained pool on record was in v1: on 18 April 2020 an attacker used imBTC, an ERC-777 token with transfer callbacks, to re-enter the pool and take about 1,278 ETH (PeckShield). That was a token that behaved in a way v1 never expected, not a bug in how v1 priced swaps.

Most losses Uniswap users suffer happen on the user's side of the contract:

• Scam tokens. Anyone can create a pool for any token. Buying a honeypot or a fake ticker through Uniswap is legal and irreversible. A 2022 class action over scam tokens (Risley v. Universal Navigation) was dismissed. The Second Circuit said in February 2025 that holding a contract's author liable for third-party misuse "defies logic".
• Approval phishing. Fake airdrops and look-alike sites ask for token approvals or Permit2 signatures. Check the domain, and read what you sign.
• Sandwiching and slippage. A loose slippage setting on a thin pool invites MEV bots to trade around you.
• v4 hooks and LP ranges. A malicious or buggy hook can harm LPs in that one pool. An out-of-range v3 position earns nothing.

On the regulatory side, the SEC sent Labs a Wells notice in April 2024 and closed the investigation without action in February 2025 (Uniswap Labs). The CFTC fined Labs $175,000 in September 2024 over leveraged tokens that were tradable through its interface (CFTC). No user funds were involved in either case.

Uniswap Labs runs three front doors to the protocol: the web interface at app.uniswap.org, a self-custody mobile wallet, and a browser-extension wallet. All three are Labs products, not the protocol. You can reach the same pools through aggregators, other wallets or your own contract call, and the pools don't care which route you took.

• Web app. Routes across v2, v3 and v4 pools and UniswapX, shows price impact and the route before you sign, and hides tokens it flags as suspicious.
• Mobile wallet and extension. Self-custody: Labs never holds your keys, so a lost recovery phrase cannot be restored by support.
• Fees. Under UNIfication, Labs set its interface, wallet and API fees to zero. The pool fee and gas still apply.

Because the app is a company's website, it applies rules the protocol does not, such as token screening and geographic blocking. If the site were ever blocked or taken down, your liquidity would still be in the pools and you could withdraw it through another interface.

UNIfication is the change that matters for anyone valuing UNI. The token went from a pure governance token to one with a burn tied to usage. Protocol fees collect in a TokenJar contract and are used to burn UNI through a Firepit contract. The 100 million UNI retroactive burn was sized as what the fee switch would have burned had it been on since launch. Unichain sequencer fees, after L1 data costs and a 15% share to Optimism, go to the same burn. Labs put those at about $7.5 million a year when the proposal was written (Uniswap Labs). UNI's market data is on our market page.