Providing liquidity to Uniswap liquidity pools allows you to earn a share of the fees generated by trading activity.
Traders on Uniswap pay the 0.3% fee per trade to the liquidity pool as part of the Automated Market Maker (AMM) scheme. Liquidity providers earn 100% of the associated fees and the percentage of the pool they own determines what portion of the fees they earn individually.
In this simple guide you will learn how to add liquidty to a pool on Uniswap by using the OctoFi platform (app.octo.fi) and the MetaMask browser extension on desktop.
1. Select a liquidity pool
The first step is to select which Uniswap liquidity pool you'd like to participate in as a liquidity provider. In this example, we will choose the OCTO-USDC liquidity pool.
Navigate to app.octo.fi/#/defi/pools and type octo into the search box to locate the OCTO-USDC liquidity pool on the Uniswap tab.
Click on the Add Liquidity button to commence the process of approving the OCTO and USDC. Please note that in order to provide liquidity to the pool, you will need to add an equal value of each token from your wallet as the pools are 50/50 balanced.
2. Approve token pair
Now the token pair modal window is displayed you can input the amount for one of the given tokens and based on current price the other token input will appear.
You also have the option to select a gas setting to determine the speed you prefer for submitting transactions. This is a personal preference and selecting faster speeds incurs a higher transaction fee for you to pay.
Once you are happy with your settings, press the Approve OCTO button and you will be shown a pop up windown by your MetaMask wallet browser extension.
Double check your transaction fee is what you expect and click the Confirm button.
Allow some time for the approval transaction to confirm and also click on the Approve USDC button to complete the approvals required for adding liquidity.
After clicking the Confirm button in your MetaMask window you will need to wait for the transaction confirmation.
3. Supply tokens to pool
Once your final approval transaction is confirmed, you will see a Supply button for the actual depositing of your tokens to the Uniswap pool.
Check that you are happy with the input amounts and gas setting and click on the Supply button.
Now you will be shown a summary of the OCTO and USDC you will be depositing to the OCTO-USDC liquidity pool on Uniswap.
If everything looks as expected you can click on the Confirm Supply button to initiate the final transaction associated with providing liquidity to the Uniswap pool.
Double check the transaction in your MetaMask window, confirm you are happy with the gas fee, and click on the Confirm button to submit the transaction.
You are essentially exchanging your OCTO and USDC tokens for a pool token that can be used at any time in future to redeem any amount of your deposit.
4. Confirm receipt of pool token
You can click View on Etherscan to go and view the pending transaction and ensure it's successful. You can also click through to your Ethereum address from the transaction.
Once complete, you will now see a new token in your ERC-20 token balances, called Uniswap V2 (UNI-V2) for this particular example.
You are now set to earn your share of the fees generated by the liquidity pool which are easily tracked by going to info.uniswap.org/account/yourAddress in your browser.
