Uniswap Launches ETH/USDC Pool With Separate Buy and Sell Fees

Uniswap Labs has launched an $ETH/$USDC pool on Ethereum mainnet that charges separate, market-sensitive fees for buying and selling $ETH, aiming to leave more arbitrage value with liquidity providers.

The company announced VolatilePair Hook on Oct. 14. The Uniswap v4 pool was initialized onchain on Oct. 13 at 7:35 p.m. ET, and swap logs confirm trading on Oct. 14.

The hook—code that customizes a v4 pool's behavior—targets a cost of providing liquidity: trading against faster-moving markets. In a static-fee pool, buyers and sellers pay the same fee. When $ETH jumps elsewhere, a trader can buy at the pool's stale price and capture the difference that fees do not cover.

VolatilePair recalculates fees on every swap. Its base buy and sell fees add up to a configured resting spread, but the split changes with recent pool-price moves. A rise increases the base fee for buying $ETH and lowers it for selling; a fall reverses that adjustment.

The total charge can rise beyond those base fees. After a large move, a temporary surcharge applies to trades pushing the price back, letting LPs collect a share of the reversal opportunity. It applies to every swap in that direction during the affected block, not just arbitrage bots. The first swap in the next block containing a trade recomputes it; if the price has not moved since the previous block's opening price, it becomes zero.

A further fee component grows as the price moves away from the current block's opening level. For traders, that means a lower base fee on one side does not necessarily mean a lower total charge after a sharp move.

A Small Starting Pool

At 12:21 p.m. ET on Oct. 14, Uniswap's pool dashboard displayed about $12,600 in total value locked and $371.08 in its 24-hour volume field. It also listed a 20,000 $USDC rewards allocation for Oct. 14–28. Those incentives are separate from the trading fees the hook sets.

The launch extends Uniswap's asset-specific fee designs beyond StablePair Hook, introduced in September. StablePair measures deviations from a reference rate and uses a Dutch auction for trades restoring that rate from outside a set band. VolatilePair instead responds to recent price movements in assets that do not trade around a fixed rate.

LPs seeking the new fee structure must supply liquidity to the VolatilePair pool; the announcement invites them to port liquidity there. Once in place, pool parameters and fee logic can be changed through Uniswap Governance without requiring the pool to migrate, according to the hook's documentation.