Uniswap Labs loses exclusive rights to the code of the Uniswap v3 protocol

Third-party developers of decentralized applications have gained the ability to create forks of the Uniswap v3 protocol. According to the project’s technical documentation, the term of the Business Source License (BSL) expired on April 1, 2023.

BSL is a software‑code license that restricts its use for a given period. In the case of Uniswap, until recently anyone could copy the software for free for non-commercial purposes, but to create commercial products one would need permission from the project’s DAO.

As of April 1, the protocol’s code has been licensed under the General Public License (an open license), and Uniswap Labs no longer holds exclusive rights to it. This means that developers can freely use it to deploy smart contracts on any available networks.

The community speculated that the change would lead to Uniswap forks on blockchains where the decentralised exchange is not yet present. These include, for example, Tron and Avalanche.

Uniswap’s BUSL license expires today.

We’ll probably start seeing some v3 forks here and there. And probably airdrops too, like what happened with Solidly. BTW, Uniswap is not in FTM yet.

Uniswap’s zkSync deployment is still underway. Could it be front runned?

— olimpio (@OlimpioCrypto) April 1, 2023

Uniswap noted that the DAO would need to determine which forks could be considered “official.” For consideration by participants, they tabled a proposal that would require the organisation to support only one fork in each network.

To that end, the fork must meet a number of criteria. For example, its code must be equivalent to the original.

According to DeFi Llama, Uniswap is one of the most popular decentralised protocols. At the time of writing, assets worth $3.94 billion are locked in its smart contracts.

Back in March 2023, the Uniswap team deployed the third version of the protocol on the BNB Chain network.