Uniswap Labs to institute 0.15% fee on select assets and frontends

Traders who utilize frontends built by the Uniswap Labs development team to interact with the Uniswap DEX will be subject to a 0.15% fee starting Tuesday.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams announced the fee in an X post today, framing the charges as a way to fund ongoing development. The fee will only apply to the Uniswap web app and the Uniswap.org frontend. 

Assets subject to the fee include “[ether] ETH, USDC, WETH, USDT, DAI, WBTC, agEUR, GUSD, LUSD, EUROC, XSGD,” and both the input and output tokens must be among those subject for the fee to be collected. 

According to info.uniswap.org, the DEX accounts for $2.7 billion in total value locked, and saw over $700 million in volume on a 24-hour basis. By contrast, centralized crypto exchange Coinbase saw $1.75 billion over the past 24 hours. 

The fee is somewhat ironic, given the struggles Uniswap DAO has faced in turning on the “fee switch.” Uniswap’s (UNI) token essentially has two powers: enabling holders to vote on disbursements from the treasury, and enabling a fee on trading pools that would hypothetically distribute to UNI token holders. 

An effort in June to trigger the fee switch failed, with major “no” voters citing tax and regulatory concerns.

In a research note on the announcement, Blockworks Research wrote that the 0.15% fee is more aggressive than centralized exchanges such as Binance, which charges a 0.1% maker and taker fee, but that Uniswap’s volume will remain robust regardless. Metamask Swaps, meanwhile, charges a 0.875% interface fee. 

According to data from Blockworks Research, the fee would have generated an estimated $22 million in revenue YTD for Uniswap Labs. 

Updated Oct. 16, 2023 at 6:33 pm ET: This article has been updated to add additional interface fee and Blockworks Research data.

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