ICPSwap: Chibuzor Daniel Uwezukwe

ICPSwap: Native DEX on the Internet Computer Protocol

2026-07-27

ICPSwap is the first and native decentralised exchange on the Internet Computer Protocol blockchain. It provides AMM-based token swapping, liquidity provision, staking, and DAO governance services: all running as on-chain canisters, which are ICP's equivalent of smart contracts. ICPSwap is the primary liquidity hub for the ICP ecosystem with over $615 million in all-time volume.

Every swap on ICPSwap incurs a 0.3% fee. Of that, 0.24% goes to liquidity providers, and 0.06% is allocated to ICS token buybacks and burns. The buyback-and-burn creates deflationary pressure on the ICS governance token, making the 0.06% the proxy for protocol revenue. A portion of that 0.06% also goes directly to governance token holders rather than to burns, depending on the pool configuration.

ICP uses a completely different paradigm from EVM or Solana chains. Data lives in actor-model canisters accessed over the Candid RPC protocol: there are no event logs, no eth_getLogs, no program accounts. The adapter required learning ICP's agent-js library and understanding how to query canister state to pull swap transaction data. Each swap call on the canister returns input and output amounts which are used to compute the 0.3% fee. The 0.06% portion going to buybacks is tracked via canister-to-canister call logs to the ICS burn address. Volume is computed from ICRC-1 token prices at swap time. Building this adapter was a genuine exercise in learning a new blockchain paradigm from the ground up.

All-time volume stands at $615 million, with $4.8 million in the past seven days and $595,000 in the most recent day. ICP has a niche but growing DeFi ecosystem, and ICPSwap's numbers reflect steady, organic usage rather than speculative spikes.