Tick Spacing

Tick spacing is the granularity at which liquidity providers are allowed to place position boundaries. A pool with a tick spacing of 60 accepts positions whose lower and upper ticks are multiples of 60, and rejects every tick in between. The value is fixed per fee tier when the pool is created and can never change.

Why a protocol would restrict its own granularity

Finer spacing is strictly better for the liquidity provider, so the constraint exists for the benefit of everyone else. Two costs scale with the number of usable ticks.

The first is the swap loop. A swap that moves the price across a range must stop at every initialized tick along the way, load that tick's state, apply its liquidity delta, and continue. Halving the tick spacing roughly doubles the number of stops a large swap has to make, and every stop is a cold storage read.

The second is the search structure. Uniswap V3 tracks which ticks are initialized in a bitmap, one bit per tick, and finds the next initialized tick by scanning a single 256-bit word. Tick spacing determines how much price range one word covers. Wide spacing means one word spans a large price move, so the common case resolves in one read.

Tick spacing is therefore a deliberate trade: the protocol sells some of the LP's precision to buy every swapper a bounded gas cost.

The pairing with fee tiers

Uniswap V3 launched with three fee tiers, each carrying its own spacing: 0.05% with a spacing of 10, 0.30% with 60, and 1.00% with 200. A fourth, 0.01% with a spacing of 1, was added by governance later.

The pairing is not arbitrary. A stablecoin pair trading in a band of a few basis points needs positions placed with basis-point precision to be worth opening at all, and it also sees enough volume that the tighter gas cost is amortized. An exotic pair that may move 50% in a day gains nothing from precision it will never use, and its swaps would pay for the extra ticks on every trade.

Consequences for integrators and auditors

Any contract that opens positions on behalf of users must round its desired boundaries to the pool's spacing, and must round in a direction it has thought about. Rounding a lower tick up and an upper tick down narrows the range the user asked for; rounding both the same direction shifts it. A manager that rounds naively can hand a user a position that is out of range at the moment it is minted.

Tick spacing also bounds the maximum liquidity that can sit on any single tick. Uniswap V3 derives a per-tick liquidity cap from the spacing so that the accumulated liquidity net of all positions crossing one tick cannot overflow the pool's liquidity accumulator. A fork that changes the spacing without recomputing that cap reintroduces an overflow the original design had closed.