The LSE Directory / Crypto exchanges
Uniswap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol built on Ethereum and deployed across more than a dozen EVM-compatible networks, developed and maintained by Uniswap Labs. Rather than matching buy and sell orders on a central book, it prices and executes token swaps through smart contract liquidity pools funded by third-party liquidity providers, using an automated market maker (AMM) model built on a constant-product formula, x*y=k. Trades settle directly against these pools with no custodial intermediary holding user funds. The protocol's governance token, UNI, launched in September 2020 and is used to vote on protocol parameters and treasury decisions through the Uniswap DAO, supported by the Uniswap Foundation. Uniswap specializes in permissionless, non-custodial spot trading of ERC-20 and other EVM-native tokens, serving traders, liquidity providers, and other DeFi protocols and wallets that integrate its contracts or API rather than one specific retail demographic. Its differentiation has come from iterative protocol design: Uniswap v3 (2021) introduced concentrated liquidity, letting liquidity providers allocate capital to custom price ranges for better capital efficiency, and Uniswap v4 (mainnet January 30, 2025) introduced hooks, modular smart contracts that let developers attach custom logic to pool actions such as dynamic fees or automated liquidity management, alongside a singleton PoolManager contract that cut the gas cost of creating a new pool by up to 99.99 percent. In February 2025, Uniswap Labs extended this into its own infrastructure by launching Unichain, an Ethereum layer-2 network built on the OP Stack with one second block times and gas costs roughly 95 percent below Ethereum mainnet; more than 100 protocols, including Circle, Coinbase, Lido, and Morpho, were building on it at launch. The protocol was created by Hayden Adams, a former mechanical engineer at Siemens, who began building it in 2018 after reading a blog post by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on automated market makers; Adams remains CEO of Uniswap Labs. The company raised an 11 million dollar Series A in 2020 and a 165 million dollar Series B in October 2022 led by Polychain Capital with participation from a16z crypto, Paradigm, SV Angel, and Variant, valuing Uniswap Labs at 1.66 billion dollars. By 2026 the protocol had processed more than 3 trillion dollars in cumulative trading volume since launch, making it the largest decentralized exchange by that measure. Uniswap Labs received a Wells notice from the US Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2024 signaling potential enforcement over unregistered exchange and broker activity; the SEC closed that investigation with no action in February 2025. Separately, in March 2026 a federal judge in the Southern District of New York dismissed with prejudice a proposed class action that had sought to hold Uniswap Labs, Adams, and its venture backers liable for scam tokens traded on the protocol, ruling that developers of a decentralized, permissionless protocol are not responsible for third parties' misuse of it. In December 2025, UNI holders passed the UNIfication governance proposal (a joint Uniswap Labs and Uniswap Foundation initiative posted November 10, 2025) by an overwhelming margin, activating protocol level trading fees for the first time on v2 and select v3 pools, directing Unichain sequencer revenue toward burning UNI, and burning 100 million UNI from the treasury outright as compensation for prior years without active fees, a step intended to turn UNI into a fee accruing asset rather than a purely governance only token. In June 2026, Uniswap Labs extended the protocol into tokenized real world assets, adding tokenized stocks, bonds, and yield bearing instruments, including tokenized SpaceX, Apple, Tesla, and NVIDIA exposure, to the Uniswap Web App, Wallet, and API; Uniswap Labs reported more than 9.1 billion dollars swapped across its real world asset pools by more than 140,000 wallets at the time of that announcement.
