Uniswap v4 delayed release, official releases "coming soon" information
Decentralized exchange Uniswap has hinted that its latest version, Uniswap v4, will be “launching soon” after failing to meet its Q3 2024 launch target. Uniswap Labs released an image made using Unicode on X on January 2, showing the year 2025, with the title "v4 coming soon." However, the post did not specify when it would be released this year.
Image source: X Uniswap Labs issued a statement stating that the V4 upgrade is coming soon
In a post on December 31, Uniswap Labs said there is a lot to look forward to in 2025, adding: “Between v4, Unichain, and a few other surprises… it’s going to be a pretty exciting year.”
Source: X Uniswap Labs indicates that there are many exciting things to look forward to in 2025
As early as June 2023, protocol founder Hayden Adams expressed his vision for Uniswap v4 when releasing the code draft, stating it could be built in an open manner, welcoming open feedback and meaningful community contributions. 'We expect this to be a process lasting several months,' he said at the time.
Last February, the team announced that v4 was tentatively scheduled for release in the third quarter after the Ethereum Dencun upgrade. However, the fourth version of this popular decentralized exchange will remain in a testing phase throughout 2024.
Last November, the team announced a $15.5 million bug bounty before the release of its v4 core smart contracts. The program is still ongoing, offering rewards starting at $2,000 for discovering unique vulnerabilities that lead to code changes.
The last major update of the protocol was v3, released in May 2021, which offered upgrades such as concentrated liquidity, allowing providers to allocate liquidity within custom price ranges.
Major improvements and features of Uniswap v4
Uniswap v4 will represent a significant architectural change compared to previous versions, with some key features including Hooks that will allow developers to execute custom code before and after swaps. It will enable functionalities such as limit orders, custom oracles, fee management, and automated liquidity management; while also including dynamic fees, Gas savings, Flash Accounting, native Ether support, and multiple pool types.
Uniswap v4 inherits all the capital efficiency advantages of Uniswap v3, but provides flexibility through Hooks and Gas optimizations throughout the lifecycle. Developers can attach Solidity logic to the swap lifecycle. Logic can be executed before and/or after key operations, such as pool creation, liquidity addition and removal, swaps, and donations.
Hooks are deployed contracts called by the Uniswap v4 PoolManager for permissionless execution. The flexibility of Hooks enables: limit orders, custom oracles, fee management, and automated liquidity management.
Uniswap v4 supports dynamic fees, allowing pools to adjust their fees up or down. While other AMMs may have hardcoded logic for dynamic fees, v4 does not provide any arbitrary calculation for fees. The frequency of liquidity fee updates is also flexible, determined by developers. Fee updates can occur on every swap, every block, or on any schedule (weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.). Dynamic fees open up design space for fee optimization, value redistribution, and research.
Uniswap continues to lead the DEX market
Architecturally, all pool states and operations are managed by a single contract, PoolManager.sol. This singleton design provides significant Gas savings. For example, creating a pool is now a state update rather than deploying a new contract. Swapping through multiple pools no longer requires transferring tokens for intermediate pools. By leveraging EIP-1153 transient storage, v4 provides an optimization called Flash Accounting. Swaps, liquidity modifications, and donations will result in balance changes, i.e., tokens to be sent and tokens to be withdrawn.
Through Flash Accounting, these balance changes are effectively recorded in transient storage and offset against each other. This system allows users to only pay the final balance changes without resolving intermediate balance changes. Uniswap v4 supports native token assets (Ether) without requiring native tokens to be wrapped/unwrapped into wrapped Ether (WETH9). The flexibility of custom accounting allows developers to change the number of tokens for swaps and liquidity modifications. This feature opens up design space for Hooks to charge fees or forgo the underlying concentrated liquidity model.
Source: Differences between 'Flash Accounting' in the Uniswap Labs V4 upgrade and V3
According to data from DefiLlama, DEX trading volume reached an all-time high in December, soaring to $462 billion, while Uniswap remained the largest DEX by trading volume, recording $106 billion during that period. Despite delays in the release of Uniswap v4, the many improvements and features it brings are still worth looking forward to, likely further solidifying Uniswap's leading position in the DEX market.
'Major update for DEX leader! Uniswap v4 is about to launch, with three major features previewed' was first published in 'Crypto City'
