Uniswap Exchange: Swap tokens & Top Liquidity

Description

What is Uniswap?

Uniswap is a protocol for creating liquidity and trading ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. It eliminates trusted intermediaries and unnecessary forms of rent extraction, allowing for fast, efficient trading. Where it makes tradeoffs decentralization, censorship resistance, and security are prioritized. Uniswap is open-source software licensed under GPL.

If you want to dive into details check out the docs.




How can I add a token to Uniswap?
Uniswap is compatible with any ERC-20 token in the ethereum ecosystem. If you want your project to be searchable in their interface you should seek to be added to a reputable token list or share a link to your token using query parameters. Once loaded via link, the token will be added to their interface.

Another option is to open a request using github issues.

The uniswap team makes no guarantees or provides any timeline. Nor will the team ever charge or request funds. We’ve added many UX features to make it easier to share a new token with communities like local storage support and custom linking. Please make use of them.




How do I use Uniswap?

First you’ll need an Ethereum Wallet and some ETH. Once completed, head over to the app to start using the protocol to provide liquidity or swap tokens. Remember that each transaction on Ethereum costs ETH (this is called the “gas fee” and it’s paid to miners to keep the network running).




My swap failed with code “EXPIRED”, what happened?

If a swap takes more than 20 minutes to execute, the router is programmed to fail the transaction. This is to protect the user from extreme swings in prices that can occur while the transaction is pending. If this happens, your tokens will still be in your wallet, but the gas fees paid are not recoverable. To keep this from happening, use a high enough gas price to have your transaction mined in under 20 minutes. This usually falls under “Standard” or “Fast” in most gas price calculators.




When Uniswap was built?

The Uniswap platform was built in 2018 on top of the Ethereum blockchain, the world’s second-largest token project by market capitalization, which makes it compatible with all ERC-20 tokens and infrastructure such as wallet services like MetaMask and MyEtherWallet.

Uniswap is also completely open source, which means anyone can copy the code to create their own decentralized exchanges. It even allows users to list tokens on the exchange for free. Normal centralized exchanges are profit-driven and charge very high fees to list new coins, so this alone is a notable difference. Because Uniswap is a decentralized exchange (DEX), it also means users maintain control of their funds at all times as opposed to a centralized exchange that requires traders to give up control of their private keys so that orders can be logged on an internal database rather than be executed on a blockchain, which is more time consuming and expensive. By retaining control of private keys, it eliminates the risk of losing assets if the exchange is ever hacked.

According to the latest figures, Uniswap is currently the fourth-largest decentralized finance (DeFi) platform and has over $3 billion worth of crypto assets locked away on its protocol.




Automated liquidity protocol

The way Uniswap solves the liquidity problem (described in the introduction) of centralized exchanges is through an automated liquidity protocol. This works by incentivizing people trading on the exchange to become liquidity providers (LPs): Uniswap users pool their money together to create a fund that’s used to execute all trades that take place on the platform. Each token listed has its own pool that users can contribute to, and the prices for each token are worked out using a math algorithm run by a computer (explained in “How token price is determined,” below).

With this system, a buyer or seller does not have to wait for an opposite party to appear to complete a trade. Instead, they can execute any trade instantly at a known price provided there’s enough liquidity in the particular pool to facilitate it.

In exchange for putting up their funds, each LP receives a token that represents the staked contribution to the pool. For example, if you contributed $10,000 to a liquidity pool that held $100,000 in total, you would receive a token for 10% of that pool. This token can be redeemed for a share of the trading fees. Uniswap charges users a flat 0.30% fee for every trade that takes place on the platform and automatically sends it to a liquidity reserve.

Whenever a liquidity provider decides they want to exit, they receive a portion of the total fees from the reserve relative to their staked amount in that pool. The token they received which keeps a record of what stake they’re owed is then destroyed.

After the Uniswap v.2 upgrade, a new protocol fee was introduced that can be turned on or off via a community vote and essentially sends 0.05% of every 0.30% trading fee to a Uniswap fund to finance future development. Currently, this fee option is turned off, however, if it is ever turned on it means LPs will start receiving 0.25% of pool trading fees.




Uniswap Arbitrage

Arbitrage traders are an essential component of the Uniswap ecosystem. These are traders that specialize in finding price discrepancies across multiple exchanges and use them to secure a profit. For example, if bitcoin was trading on Kraken for $35,500 and Binance at $35,450, you could buy bitcoin on Binance and sell it on Kraken to secure an easy profit. If done with large volumes it’s possible to bank a considerable profit with relatively low risk.

What arbitrage traders do on Uniswap is find tokens that are trading above or below their average market price – as a result of large trades creating imbalances in the pool and lowering or raising the price – and buy or sell them accordingly. They do this until the price of the token rebalances in line with the price on other exchanges and there is no more profit to be made. This harmonious relationship between the automated market maker system and arbitrage traders is what keeps Uniswap token prices in line with the rest of the market.




Uniswap tools and resources
https://github.com/Uniswap/universe