The team developing Uniswap is pleased to announce Continuous Clearing Auctions (CCA), which is described as being a permissionless protocol that helps teams “bootstrap” liquidity on Uniswap v4 and find “the market price for new and low-liquidity tokens.” As explained in a blog post, this is said to be the first of several tools they’re now building in order to help various projects launch and deepen liquidity on the Uniswap protocol.
Built in collaboration with Aztec, the first project to launch with CCA, the protocol also includes an “optional ZK Passport module that enables private, verifiable participation.”
As noted in the update shared by Uniswap, liquidity formation often happens behind “closed doors.” That creates information gaps, “privileges a few players, and can leave markets thin and unstable.”
The team said they now think there is “a better way.”
CCA was designed around three core principles:
- Onchain-native market creation. The entire auction runs onchain, with pricing, bidding, and settlement happening transparently. No gatekeepers or offchain deals.
- Fair, gradual price discovery. Supply is distributed over time through a continuous clearing process. This incentivizes bidding early, reduces sniping, limits volatility, and helps the market converge toward a fair value.
- Automatic liquidity seeding on Uniswap v4. When the auction ends, proceeds automatically create a Uniswap v4 pool at the discovered price, deepening liquidity.
Projects begin by clearly defining how many tokens “to sell, a starting price, and how long the auction will run.” They can also customize with options like running in tranches, adding verification tools “such as ZK Passport, or building entirely new modules on top of the platform.”
Users then submit bids, specifying a “maximum price and a total spend. Bids are non-withdrawable while in range (can be withdrawn if they’re out of range) but users can place as many as they like while the auction is live.” Each bid is automatically spread across the “remaining blocks of the auction, using the same max price for every split.” A bid only fills “if the block’s clearing price is at or below the bidder’s limit.”
At the end of each block, the protocol sets “a single market-clearing price – the highest price where all tokens for that block can be sold.” Higher bids fill first, then “bids at the clearing price, pro rata if needed. Everyone who fills in that block pays the same price.”
As more bids come in and supply per block stays pre-set, “clearing prices stay the same or trend upward.” Early bidders tend to get a “better average price since a larger portion of their bid can fill in earlier, cheaper blocks.”
The Continuous Clearing Auction contract is now said to be live, and available for “anyone who wants to use it.”
In the months ahead, the team said that they will release additional modules to improve the experience “for projects and communities launching with CCA.”
