Following months of teasers and announcements about announcements, Uniswap has finally unveiled the specifications for its v3 upgrade. It added that the mainnet launch had been planned for May 5.
The world’s leading DEX stated that it will be the most flexible and capital-efficient automated market maker ever designed. However, highly anticipated scaling solutions to reduce transaction fees will not be included in the May launch and will come sometime later.
“We are targeting an L1 Ethereum mainnet launch on May 5, with an L2 deployment on Optimism set to follow shortly after.”
Uniswap touted the most significant improvement as concentrated liquidity, which essentially aggregates the positions of individual liquidity providers into one pool that is used for the price curve.
Liquidity providers can supply liquidity with up to 4000x capital efficiency relative to Uniswap v2, earning higher returns on their capital, the blog post added.
“In Uniswap v3, LP’s can concentrate their capital within custom price ranges, providing greater amounts of liquidity at desired prices.”
The enhancement paves the way for low slippage trade execution while allowing yield farmers to increase their exposure to preferred assets and reduce their downside risk. It also explained that the custom price curves will mean that liquidity positions are no longer fungible and are not represented as ERC20 tokens in the core protocol but represented by non-fungible tokens instead.
Another improvement is with the price oracles, which have been tweaked for easier and cheaper integration over the previous version of the protocol.
Unfortunately for the non-whale users of the protocol, there will be little relief in the high transaction fees, which are as much as $40 per transaction at the moment, according to Etherscan.
“The gas cost of v3 swaps on Ethereum mainnet is slightly cheaper than v2.”
Uniswap’s native token has taken a hit of 8.5% on the day, falling back to $31, according to CoinGecko. It is possible that the lack of scaling in the initial launch has burst the bubble for those hoping for major gas relief. The v3 improvements appear to be beneficial to big bag holders, dropping a lot of liquidity, and this is being reflected in market sentiment for UNI.
Over the past two weeks, UNI has slid by 6%, but it has still gained 520% since the beginning of 2021. In terms of total value locked, the DEX is hovering around its all-time high of $5.2 billion, according to DappRadar.