WHEN MULTIPLE POOLS BEHAVE LIKE ONE: IMPACT-CONSTRAINED CAPACITY IN UNISWAP V3

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

A study of 293,273 capacity scenarios across 78 Ethereum token families finds that Uniswap v3 pool multiplicity delivers almost no distributed execution capacity in practice. The median HHI across scenarios sits at 0.930, the top pool captures a 96.3% median share, and only 0.67% of scenarios achieve an effective pool count above 2, with multi-pool routing adding just 3.2% capacity on average. Reconstructed daily pool states show actual trading concentration exceeds the already-concentrated liquidity-layer capacity on 67.6% of matched family-days, with a Spearman correlation of 0.841 between observed and modeled distributions. The analysis covers liquidity-layer capacity only and excludes gas costs, routing friction, and MEV, meaning measured concentration represents a floor, not a ceiling.