Uniswap built the NYSE and nobody came

Uniswap is the EVM's default DEX, and it is the cleanest example of a house built for the tables rather than the players. It was built for liquidity providers and the funds that make markets for them. Look at what the fee does in each version and you can see who it was built for.

The crowd that showed up was never the one it was built for. Retail came, the institutions did not, and the fee kept flowing to the tables anyway. When Robinhood launched its own chain, Uniswap was aboard as the primary AMM from day one, and within two weeks the chain was top five by DEX volume. Whatever Uniswap's incentives are, they are the incentives of the entire EVM.

So look at them closely.

v2: fees the pool keeps

Uniswap v2 charges 0.30% per swap, taken inside the pool, in both tokens of the pair. The fee compounds into the reserves. A liquidity provider realizes it one way only: by removing liquidity.

For a memecoin, that design works in exactly one case: when the LP is burned or locked. Then nobody can pull the fees out, the pool gets deeper as volume flows, and price and liquidity grow together. It is the case that matters. SHIB launched on a v2 pair in August 2020. PEPE launched in April 2023 with its LP tokens burned.

Notice what the token's creator gets in this model: nothing. The fees belong to the pool. If the dev wants to get paid, the dev sells the token, on their own chart, in front of everyone.

v3: fees for whoever can leave

v3 rebuilt liquidity around positions. An LP position became an NFT, its fees became collectable at any time without touching the principal, and concentrated ranges made single-sided liquidity possible.

For professional market makers, all upside. For a memecoin, each change points the wrong way. Fees that used to deepen the pool now get extracted as they accrue, so the pool never thickens as the token grows. Single-sided ranges let anyone park a wall of supply across a price range, which is a sell wall by construction. And fees accrue in whichever token the trade pays, so every sell pays its fee in the memecoin itself.

The record matches the mechanics. No memecoin launched on a v3 pool on Ethereum mainnet has reached a billion dollars.

A square peg in a round hole

The peg is the Solana creator fee: a cash cut of every trade, paid to the person who made the token. The hole is Uniswap v3. EVM launchpads want to offer the same deal, so they force the one into the other: they build the creator fee out of the only material Uniswap gives them, a locked v3 position whose fees route to the creator. The next chapter covers how Solana does it natively. This section is what happens when you hammer.

That construction inherits everything above. The "creator fee" accrues half in the memecoin, the pool bleeds instead of deepening, and the launch itself is a single-sided position, the sell wall as a business model.

Uniswap, for its part, cut its interface fee to zero by governance vote in December 2025. Trading on Uniswap costs the pool fee plus gas, and returns nothing: no rakeback, no creator fees, no launch surface. The cheapest possible version of a model built for someone other than you.

That is the house on every EVM chain today: the rake stays with the tables, the creator sells on their own chart to get paid, and the player is the revenue. Now look at the one place that changed half of it: Solana paid the dealers.