If you have been using Uniswap much at all over the past month you cannot fail to have noticed the rapidly rising cost of Ethereum gas fees when doing trades. They have gone from 20 gwei to a ridiculous 300 at one point, making the dex a whale game where small trades are costing too much gas to make it worthwhile.
There is a handy and helpful thing you can do to help yourself save 15-20% every transaction (regardless of the gas price) and if you do several trades this can really build up.
The crazy thing? Uniswap does not even inform their own users this is able to be done.
Uniswap is built on a WETH (Wrapped Ether) system where every trade must go into WETH before being paired with another coin. Let's take an AKRO trade of 0.5 ETH as an example.
This trade essentially gets routed ETH > WETH > AKRO
This is costing you $6.71 in gas fees as behind the scenes it is buying you WETH, then buying AKRO.
Now lets try this again with WETH only, so we are going WETH > AKRO and cutting out that middleman step of the process:
As you can see, by cutting out one step you are saving nearly $1 on gas fees in this transaction.
Obviously, you need WETH to begin with and buying this will cost gas itself so on a one off trade this is not worth your time. However if you are doing multiple trades weekly this saving really begins to build up.
You can also cut out the need to buy WETH for your trades by doing this process in reverse so that when you sell an asset you are not only saving in gas fees on that transaction you have WETH handy at all times to use in further trades.
