Ekubo Protocol

Ekubo was created by Ekubo, Inc., a Delaware company founded by Moody Salem, who joined Uniswap Labs as its fifth employee in 2020, wrote roughly half of the Uniswap v3 contract code, and led the architecture of v4 before leaving in 2022. He wrote the initial protocol in Cairo in under three months and deployed it to Starknet mainnet on August 26, 2023, bringing a v4-style singleton and extension design to Starknet before Uniswap v4 shipped. The protocol did not raise venture capital; its largest outside support was a 6 million STRK Catalyst grant from the Starknet Foundation. In October 2023 Salem proposed that the Uniswap DAO invest 3 million UNI (about $12 million) for 20% of a future Ekubo token, which passed a Snapshot temperature check but was not pursued by the Ekubo team. Within its first year Ekubo held roughly 60% of AMM TVL on Starknet and routed most aggregator volume on the network. EKUBO launched in 2024 with a fixed 10 million supply split into thirds: an airdrop to early LPs, a two-month DCA sale on Starknet from May 24 to July 23, 2024 that seeded the DAO treasury at roughly a $10 million valuation, and a third held by Ekubo, Inc. under a public no-sell pledge. Governance activated in June 2024 and the DAO, which votes onchain on Starknet, took control of the core contracts. Withdrawal fees equal to each pool's swap fee accrue to the DAO and fund a permissionless revenue buyback; by August 2025 the DAO had repurchased about 2% of supply. A Solidity implementation went live on Ethereum mainnet in mid-2025 with immutable core contracts, followed by Arbitrum. In May 2026 an access-control flaw in the EVM swap router let attackers drain about $1.4 million in WBTC from users with open approvals; core liquidity and the Starknet deployment were unaffected and Ekubo opened a refund portal. Documentation is at docs.ekubo.org and contracts are on GitHub.