Uniswap v4 liquidity adds grew 3.5 times in a quarter. Much of its crowd also works v3, sandwich bot included
Uniswap v4 let anyone add custom code to a pool. One quarter in, we compared how liquidity providers use it against the v3 record from our earlier study. v4 adds grew three and a half times, mostly through the standard wallet route. Thousands of wallets now work both versions, including the sandwich bot that led v3. And the thinnest order books on either version belong to the lowest fee tier, whichever version runs it.
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01 · The questionNew market, or the same crowd on a new engine?
Uniswap v4 went live on Ethereum in January 2025. Its big change is the hook, custom code that runs on a pool's trades. Twenty months on, liquidity providers want to know one thing. Is v4 a new market with new players, or v3's crowd on a new engine?
We watched every liquidity add and removal on both versions for 91 days, from July 15 to October 13, 2026. Then we set the results against our earlier Uniswap v3 study. That study valued each position in dollars. v4 does not log fees the same way, so this one compares behavior. How much liquidity goes in, how wide, for how long, and who puts it there.
Two rules keep the comparison fair. We count only adds and removals that move liquidity; each version also logs empty housekeeping events, and those stay out. And where a deposit passes through Uniswap's position manager, the standard contract a wallet app uses, we count the wallet behind it.
Correction, 15 October 2026: the first version of this article said v3 removed more liquidity than it added on every day of the window. That count kept v3 removal events that move no liquidity, a kind we had already dropped for v4. It also counted the contracts that call the pools instead of the wallets behind them, so it put the overlap between the versions at 18 addresses and missed the sandwich bot on v4. It compared pools across fee tiers and misdated the largest price move. Most sections are revised.
02 · Growthv4 adds grew 3.5 times while v3 held flat
At the start of the window both versions took about 1,300 adds per day (on v3, each add is called a mint). By the end v4 took three and a half times that, and its curve was still climbing. v3 stayed where it was.
Both versions added liquidity more often than they removed it on almost every day of the quarter. The gap between them is pace.
Most of the new v4 activity came through the position manager, the route you take when you add liquidity in the Uniswap app. Its weekly adds almost quadrupled, and the number of wallets using it doubled. Direct callers, the bots, vaults and hooks that skip the manager, grew too, at a slower rate.
That route is not all retail. Its busiest wallet in the last week opened a fresh pool and dropped one wide range into it, 802 times over. That is a token launcher seeding new coins.
03 · Range widthWallets go wide on v4, machines go tight
Every Uniswap v3 or v4 position covers a price range, and its width decides how it earns. A tight range earns more fees per dollar while the price stays inside it. A wide range earns less but rarely falls out of range.
On v3 most adds sit in the middle bands. On v4 the middle thins out and the weight moves to the two edges. The wide end mostly comes through the wallet route, and much of it is new tokens launched with a single wide range. Full-range deposits, the old Uniswap v2 style, are rare everywhere.
Direct callers do the opposite. Three in ten of their adds sit within one percent of price, and another three in ten just outside that.
04 · JIT liquidityMachines hold v4 liquidity for minutes
Pair each add with the removal that closes it and you get a holding time. Half of the closed v4 positions lasted less than an hour and a half. One in six opened and closed in the same block.
The fastest players are the direct callers. Their median position, the one in the middle when you line them all up, lasts five minutes, and four in ten never outlive their block. That is just-in-time (JIT) liquidity. A bot spots a big swap coming, parks a tight range right in front of it, takes the fee, and pulls the range out straight after. Positions placed through the wallet route last about three and a half hours.
These times cover closed positions only. 36% of positions were still open when the window ended, so a typical v4 position lives longer than the chart shows. At the other extreme, a handful of positions get refilled again and again. One was topped up 1,758 times in the quarter.
05 · The sandwich botv3's top sandwich bot also farms v4
One JIT bot hides inside the wallet route. The biggest direct depositor on v3 is the bot our v3 study tracked as the jaredfromsubway.eth successor, and it works v4 as well. On v4 it sends its liquidity through the manager, so in the pool records it looks like an ordinary wallet.
Over the quarter it opened 7,031 v4 positions across 935 pools. Every one closed in the block it opened, in a separate transaction. That is the JIT pattern from the last section, run every week of the quarter. Its v3 minting slowed over the same weeks, and its v4 pace held steadier.
06 · Who provides itOne manager, one vault, and the hooks
Two thirds of all v4 liquidity events come through the position manager. The rest comes from contracts calling the pools directly, and on v4 many of the biggest are hooks.
The largest single source is an Arrakis vault. Arrakis manages liquidity for token teams. Its vault made every add in the ETHFI/ETH pool, which was created with its own hook and a dynamic fee, and that pool took more adds than any other v4 pool. The vault keeps ranges about ten percent wide, holds each for a median six minutes, and earns a swap fee near 0.3%.
Next come the hooks themselves. DualPoolHook, shipped by Uniswap Labs, parks idle cash in a yield vault and steps into the pool only during a swap. A launch hook seeded pools for over four thousand new tokens this quarter. Burn hooks adjust ranges inside other people's trades. So a lot of v4 liquidity is the pool's own code, running inside someone else's transaction.
07 · HooksA quarter of v4 pools carry a hook
Hooks were v4's headline feature, and the pool records show them in real use. Roughly a quarter of the pools that got liquidity in the window were born with a hook. Those pools took 29% of liquidity events. Dynamic-fee pools, where the fee moves with the market, stay rare, and every one of them has a hook.
A third of the pool list is odder. These pools charge fixed fees of seventy percent and up, a setting no v3 pool could offer. They have no hooks and barely trade, with a fifth of a percent of all v4 swaps. Most are a wave of pools stamped out at 95 and 99 percent fees that almost nobody touched again. They swell the v4 pool count on paper.
08 · TurnoverThe thinnest books sit in the lowest fee tier
Every swap on v3 and v4 records how much liquidity stood at the price it traded against. That lets us measure turnover: a day's trading volume divided by the dollars resting within one percent above the price. A high number means a small pile of liquidity carries a lot of trade.
v4's 0.01% ETH/USDC pool is the extreme. It handles more swaps than any other v4 pool, though at least four pools trade more dollars. Its daily volume runs about three hundred times the liquidity resting near the price. v3's own 0.01% USDC/WETH pool runs at almost the same rate, week after week. At the 0.05% tier both versions sit near fifty, and the big hooked v4 pool sits there too.
So the thin, fast book comes with the fee tier, on either version. At a hundredth of a percent per trade, a provider earns only by parking a small range right at the price and moving it often. You can pull the same pool data through the Uniswap API or the wider DEX data API.
| Pool | What stands in it, 91 days |
|---|---|
| v4 ETH/USDC 0.01% | Most swaps of any v4 pool; at least four pools trade more dollars. $2.4M median daily volume on $7.8k resting within 1% above price. 310 turns per day. |
| v3 USDC/WETH 0.01% | The same tier on v3. $41.6M median daily volume on $129k resting. 271 turns per day. |
| v4 ETH/USDC 0.05% | $2.7M median daily volume on $52k resting. 43 turns per day. |
| v3 USDC/WETH 0.05% | The old flagship. $65.8M median daily volume on $1.27M resting. 53 turns per day. Still the deepest book on either version. |
| v4 hooked USDC/WETH | Dynamic fee. $6.3M median daily volume on $155k resting. 56 turns per day. |
| v4 ETHFI/ETH hooked | The farm. One Arrakis vault, 21,470 adds, ten percent wide, six minutes each, fee near 0.3%. |
09 · Price shocksBoth books react to big moves, v3 more reliably
Liquidity providers have to move their ranges when the price jumps. So a big move is a natural test of who is paying attention. The window held six days when ETH moved about five percent or more. The largest was Aug 19, when ETH rose 17%.
On Aug 19 both books doubled their adds against the week before. On most of the other big days v3 reacted more. On Sep 21 v3 mints more than doubled while v4 adds held level. Over the whole quarter, v3's adds track the size of ETH's daily move more closely than v4's do. v4 still answers a real shock, but its own growth drives its add count as well.
10 · Who movedThousands of wallets work both versions
Count the contracts that call each pool and the overlap looks tiny, just 18 addresses. That count hides the people, because every wallet using a position manager shows up as the manager itself.
Count the wallets that send the transactions instead. About ten thousand wallets provided v3 liquidity in the window, and twice as many provided v4 liquidity. Three thousand did both, 29% of v3's providers. The sandwich bot from section 05 is one of them.
11 · So whatSome of both
So is v4 a new market or v3's crowd on a new engine? Some of both. v4 drew twice as many liquidity wallets as v3 this quarter, and its adds grew three and a half times, mostly through the standard wallet route. Hooks run a quarter of its pools, and a few of them provide liquidity on their own.
But the players who matter most did not pick a side. Three in ten v3 liquidity wallets work both versions. The top v3 sandwich bot runs JIT positions on v4 every week. And the thin, fast order books come with the fee tier, whichever version runs it. For now, v4 is where liquidity grows, and v3 is still where it reacts to big price moves. To track how that crowd moves from here, watch the same Ethereum pools and wallets live.
Ask these questions in plain English
Every add, pool and swap in this story comes from Bitquery's Ethereum data. The Bitquery MCP server puts that data behind an AI assistant, so you can ask how a pool's liquidity moved, which wallet farms it, or how long positions stood, without writing the query yourself.
v4 liquidity events were matched per pool, sender, tick range and salt, and a position was counted closed when cumulative decreases reached 99.9% of cumulative increases. Holding times describe closed positions only; 36% of positions were still open at the end of the window, so the medians understate how long a typical position lives. Positions opened before the window and only drained inside it remain in the open count. A position that closes and is later re-used is counted once.
Zero-size events are dropped from every add and removal count on both versions: 140,408 v4 events with a zero liquidity delta and 82,042 v3 removal events with a zero amount, which collect fees without moving liquidity. Event counts measure how often liquidity is placed or pulled, not how much.
This study measures liquidity behavior, not position returns. v4 does not emit the fee record v3 does, so no return comparison with the v3 study is made here. Resting depth converts the median liquidity field of each day's swaps at the swap price and covers the band within one percent above price only; counting both sides of price roughly doubles the depth and halves the turnover.
v3 counts cover every pool that emits v3's event format. About 6% of v3 mints come from 652 pools that Uniswap's v3 factory did not create. Wallet counts use the address that sent each transaction: a bot's owner address stands for the bot, and one person can run several wallets. Sender shares treat each position manager as one sender. Contract labels mix behavior with external identification: the Arrakis vault and DualPoolHook are identified from verified contract code and Uniswap's own hook registry, while the sandwich bot and other senders are known only by their addresses and activity. The name jaredfromsubway.eth successor follows our v3 study and describes behavior, not a confirmed owner.
This article was corrected on 15 October 2026. The first version, published on 14 October, counted zero-amount v3 removals and so reported that v3 drained on all 91 days; on a like-for-like count it added more than it removed on 89. It put the v3 and v4 overlap at 18 calling contracts, said the v3 sandwich bot never touched v4, compared the turnover of pools in different fee tiers, put full-range deposits at 0.2% of v3 adds instead of 4%, and dated an 8% ETH move to Sep 21, a 5% day.
This article is provided for informational and educational purposes only and reflects analysis of publicly available on-chain data as of the dates indicated. It does not constitute legal, financial, compliance, or investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token or asset, or to provide liquidity on any protocol.
The findings describe liquidity adds, holding times, pool settings and swap activity observed on Ethereum between 15 July and 13 October 2026. Behavioral labels such as farm, bot, sandwich bot and resting depth depend on the matching method and the definitions used, and may be incomplete or revised as more data becomes available. Blockchain addresses are pseudonymous, and an address calling a pool contract does not by itself establish the identity, intent, or knowledge of any party.
References to Uniswap, the position managers, hooks, or any other named protocol or project describe what the record shows about addresses and transactions linked to them. They are not statements about any party's security practices, solvency or conduct, and nothing here asserts that any party acted unlawfully or negligently.
Nothing herein should be relied upon as a definitive determination of fact. Readers should conduct their own independent verification before taking any action. The authors and publisher accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this material. All trademarks and company names are the property of their respective owners.
Reported by Gaurav Agarwal for Bitquery Research, with AI tools; every figure was checked against the raw data.
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