Ethereum

Leading decentralized exchange Uniswap has taken a step closer to launching its highly anticipated “V3” iteration, announcing the successful deployment of V3’s smart contracts to all Ethereum test networks.

In an April 21 announcement, Uniswap Labs confirmed that the protocol’s V3 core and periphery smart contracts have been deployed to all major Ethereum testnets — Ropsten, Rinkeby, Kovan, and Goerli.

The testnet addresses were posted to Github, with Uniswap reminding users that the addresses are not final and will be changed as the team makes final updates to the periphery repository. Version three’s core contracts have also been deployed to GitHub.

A bug bounty was started on March 23 offering rewards of up to $500,000 for the discovery of high severity bugs in V3’s contracts. According to the official announcement, Uniswap v3 is expected to launch to mainnet on May 5.

Uniswap has taken a path of capital efficiency for its next upgrade which may complicate the passive income aspect of liquidity provision for many casual DeFi investors.

Some of the upgrades in the next iteration include multiple fee tiers which allowing liquidity providers to be compensated for taking on varying degrees of risk. There are also upgrades to the automated market maker bonding curves, which aggregate individual positions into a single pool to form one combined curve for users to trade against.

Uniswap V3 offers three separate fee tiers per pair according to expected pair volatility — 0.05%, 0.30%, and 1.00% — offering greater protection against impermanent loss to liquidity providers.

Despite the high Ethereum network fees, which are currently around $67.86 on average for a token swap on Uniswap according to Etherscan, the DEX continues to attract high trading volumes.

On April 20, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams posted that the platform had reached the milestone of $10 billion in weekly trading volume for the first time,

At the time of writing, the DEX’s native UNI token was trading 6.8% higher over the past 24 hours according to CoinGecko. UNI tokens were changing hands for a shade under $32, but down from their April 15 all-time high of $39.20.