About

Ekubo is a concentrated-liquidity automated market maker first deployed on Starknet in August 2023 and later on Ethereum and Arbitrum. It combines a singleton contract, a "till" settlement pattern that nets token transfers at the end of a transaction, and tick sizes of one hundredth of a basis point, and supports permissionless extensions including onchain limit orders, TWAMM-based DCA orders, and oracle pools. Protocol-level withdrawal fees flow to the Ekubo DAO, which uses them to buy back EKUBO; the token's 10 million supply is fully distributed with no vesting.

History

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. Ekubo filed a B-2 Token Transparency Filing with Blockworks in mid-2026. Documentation is at docs.ekubo.org and contracts are on GitHub.

• August 2023: Ekubo launches on Starknet mainnet
• October 2023: Uniswap DAO temperature check approves a $12 million UNI investment for 20% of a future token; Ekubo does not proceed
• May to July 2024: Two-month DCA sale of one third of EKUBO supply on Starknet, following an airdrop of another third to early LPs
• June 2024: Onchain governance activates and the DAO takes control of core contracts
• July 2024: DAO approves a roughly $1.5 million two-year grant to Ekubo, Inc.
• Mid-2025: EVM deployment goes live on Ethereum mainnet, later extended to Arbitrum
• May 2026: EVM swap router exploit drains about $1.4 million in WBTC; refund portal opened
• Mid-2026: B-2 Token Transparency Filing published with Blockworks