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Journal of Finance Vol. 80 No. 1 2025

Decentralized Exchange: The Uniswap Automated Market Maker

Alfred Lehar1; Christine Parlour

1 e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Uniswap is a system of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain and is the largest decentralized exchange with a liquidity balance worth up to 4 billion USD and daily trading volume of up to 7 billion USD. It is a new model of liquidity provision, so‐called automated market making. For this new market form, we characterize equilibrium in the liquidity pools. We collect all 95.8 million Uniswap interactions and compare this automated market maker (AMM) to a centralized limit order book. We document absence of long‐lived arbitrage opportunities, and show conditions under which the AMM dominates a limit order market.

DOI
10.1111/jofi.13405
Volume
80
Issue
1
Pages
321-374
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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