We Cut Our Fee by 75% — And $10,000 Became $27,840

$10,000 deposited into Snuggle one year ago would be worth $27,840 today.

Not from token speculation. Not from leveraged bets. From automated liquidity providing on Uniswap V3 — earning real trading fees while you sleep, eat, and live your life. Zero management required.

How did we get here? We cut our protocol fee by 75% — from 0.15% to 0.04% per rebalance — and it unlocked strategies that nearly tripled our users' money in a single year. This isn't charity. It's economics. And the data behind it will change how you think about DeFi passive income forever.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

If you've ever provided liquidity on Uniswap V3 or any concentrated liquidity DEX, you know the dilemma: tight ranges earn dramatically higher fees but require more frequent rebalancing. Every rebalance has a cost. The higher that cost, the wider your range needs to be — which means lower capital efficiency and lower returns.

Here's the math most protocols don't want you to see:

At a 0.15% protocol fee per rebalance, tight ranges are a losing game. The rebalancing cost eats your profits. So users get pushed toward wide, passive positions — 20-50% ranges with 6-48 hour delays. Safe? Sure. But mediocre. A $10,000 deposit earns you around $18,480 after a year. You're leaving thousands of dollars on the table.

At 0.04% per rebalance, everything changes. The cost drops so low that tight 1-5% ranges with 2-hour rebalancing become viable. Your capital sits concentrated exactly where the trading action is, capturing dramatically more fees. That same $10,000? Now it becomes $27,840.

That's $9,360 more in your pocket. From the same pool. The same capital. The same year.

The core insight: lower protocol fees don't just save you money — they unlock entirely different strategies that weren't economically possible before. No other automated liquidity manager can offer this, and in a moment, I'll explain exactly why.

How the Laffer Curve Led Us Here

You might recognize the Laffer Curve from economics — the principle that there's an optimal tax rate that maximizes government revenue. Tax too high and people change behavior to avoid it. Tax too low and you leave money on the table. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.

We applied the same thinking to Snuggle's protocol fee — and the results were eye-opening.

We backtested hundreds of combinations of range widths, rebalance delays, and fee levels across all six Uniswap V3 pools using 365 days of real historical price and APR data. For each fee level, we found the strategy that maximizes YOUR returns — not ours.

Here's what the data showed:

At 0.04%, users earn 9 percentage points more than at the old fee — and unlock completely different strategies. The lower cost per rebalance means tight ranges with frequent repositioning become viable for the first time.

We could have kept the higher fee. We chose your returns instead. 0.04% is just enough to cover the Chainlink Automation gas costs that keep your position optimally positioned — and every penny above that stays in your pocket.

The Results: Pool by Pool, Dollar by Dollar

We optimized every pool for the new fee level. These aren't cherry-picked results — they're the optimal configurations across every pool, every market condition, confirmed by hundreds of backtested scenarios.

All-Weather Performance (Full 365 Days)

$10,000 in WETH/USDC becomes $27,840 in one year. That same pool at the old 0.15% fee? Users were stuck at wide ranges earning $22,260. The fee cut put an extra $5,580 in your pocket — from the exact same pool.

And every single pool outperformed simply holding the tokens by +59% to +196%.

Bear Market: Where Snuggle Truly Shines

This is what we're most proud of. During the ETH bear market (August 2025 – February 2026), ETH dropped over 55% from its peak. If you were just holding, your $10,000 became roughly $4,500. Painful.

Snuggle users? A different story entirely:

Read that again. While HODL investors watched $10,000 melt to $4,500, Snuggle users grew that same $10,000 to $15,540. That's an $11,040 difference. In a bear market.

Snuggle users didn't just survive — they thrived, outperforming buy-and-hold by over 111 percentage points. This is what automated concentrated liquidity management does when the fee is low enough to enable tight, aggressive strategies.

Sideways and Bull Markets

The optimized settings adapt to every market condition:

Sideways markets favor wider ranges (7-12%) that capture fees without unnecessary rebalancing — returns of +36% to +81% across all pools ($13,600 to $18,100 on a $10K deposit), with zero negative results at any timeframe.

Bull markets use moderate ranges (2-12%) to ride momentum while earning fees — returns of +31% to +51% ($13,100 to $15,100). Even in a bull run, BTC pools beat HODL by 24-27%.

Don't know where the market is heading? Neither does anyone else. That's why the All-Weather strategy exists — optimized across the full 365-day cycle including bull runs, crashes, and everything in between. Pick it and stop guessing.

Why No Other Protocol Can Do This

Here's what makes Snuggle fundamentally different from every other automated liquidity manager:

Snuggle never swaps your tokens — and that changes everything.

When other ALMs rebalance your position, they sell one token and buy another at the worst possible moment. Price just spiked up and pushed you out of range? Traditional protocols swap at that extreme price — locking in your impermanent loss permanently. Even if the price reverses five minutes later, you've already bought high. That loss is crystallized forever.

Snuggle does the opposite. Instead of swapping, we create a single-sided position at the current price boundary and let the market come to you. As the price naturally trades back through your range, the AMM rebalances you gradually — at better average prices. You're essentially dollar-cost averaging back in instead of panic-swapping at the top.

The result? Approximately 50% less impermanent loss on every rebalance.

And you're earning trading fees the entire time you're waiting for the market to trade through your range. Traditional protocols pause your fee earnings while they swap. Snuggle keeps your capital working.

This is what really makes the +178% returns possible. It's not just about low fees — it's about a fundamentally different rebalancing approach that reduces impermanent loss instead of crystallizing it.

Here's the full cost comparison:

• Zero swap fees — no trading costs on any rebalance
• Zero slippage — no price impact from swapping
• Zero MEV — no value extraction by bots
• ~50% less impermanent loss — DCA repositioning instead of panic-swapping at extremes
• Continuous fee earning — your capital never stops working, even during rebalances
• 0.04% protocol fee — four pennies per hundred dollars, only when rebalancing occurs

Other protocols would need to charge 5-10x more just to cover their swap costs, slippage, and MEV losses — before you even account for the crystallized IL. Snuggle's zero-swap architecture is the moat, and it's why strategies that rebalance every 2 hours and produce +178% returns are only possible here.

What Changed (and the Long List of What Didn't)

Zero swap fees. Zero slippage. Zero MEV. Zero lockups. Zero management. The only thing that changed is the fee — and it got 4x cheaper:

The fee only applies when Snuggle rebalances your position — not on deposits, not on withdrawals, not while you're in range earning fees. That's $4 per $10,000 per rebalance. Just enough to cover the Chainlink Automation gas costs that keep your position optimally positioned 24/7.

There's nothing stopping you from trying. The backtester is completely free. Deposits have no minimum. There are no lockups — withdraw your full position anytime, no penalty, no waiting period.

Every Market Has an Optimal Strategy — We Found Them All

One of the most powerful features of the Snuggle backtester is the Market Outlook selector. Based on hundreds of optimized backtests, we've identified the ideal settings for each pool in every market condition:

The pattern is clear: bear and all-weather strategies favor tight, aggressive positioning because the 0.04% fee makes frequent rebalancing nearly free. Sideways and bull markets favor wider ranges that need less intervention.

Not sure what to choose? Start with All Markets. It's the all-weather strategy optimized across the full 365-day historical period — bull runs, crashes, and everything in between. It delivered +178% on WETH/USDC. It works.

Start Earning in Under 5 Minutes

1. Run your first backtest — Pick any pool, choose your market outlook, and hit Run. See exactly what your deposit would have returned using 365 days of real data. Takes 30 seconds. Completely free. No signup required. Run Your First Backtest Now →

2. Pick your pool — WETH/USDC 0.30% is our top performer: $10K → $27,840 in one year. cbBTC/USDC offers strong returns with lower volatility ($10K → $19,070). WETH/cbBTC is perfect for dual-asset exposure ($10K → $17,860).

3. Deposit and forget — Connect your wallet, use the optimized defaults (or customize), and start earning. Chainlink Automation handles every rebalance, 24/7, while you sleep, travel, or work on other things. This is actual passive income. Start Earning Now →

4. Refer and compound — Share Snuggle and earn 0.01% on every rebalance your referrals make — forever. No limits. No expiration. As they grow, you grow. Start Referring →

Two Futures

Here's the choice you're making right now:

Future A: Your crypto sits in a wallet. Or maybe you're earning 3-5% APY in a lending protocol. In a bear market, you watch it bleed. In a bull market, you hold and hope. Your capital does almost nothing.

Future B: Your capital is actively earning real trading fees on Uniswap V3 — one of the most liquid DEXs in the world. In a bear market, you're up +55% while everyone else is down. In a bull run, you're compounding. Across all markets, you're earning +42% to +178% annually. And you didn't have to touch a single button after depositing.

Every day you wait is another day your capital earns nothing. The backtester is free. The data is real. The strategies are proven across 365 days of every market condition.

Your money should be working as hard as you do.

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All returns are backtested using 365 days of real historical price and APR data (February 2025 – February 2026). Past performance does not guarantee future results. Backtests simulate Snuggle's rebalancing logic but actual returns depend on market conditions, gas costs, and pool liquidity. Bear market returns are based on detected market periods: ETH bear (178 days, Aug 13 – Feb 7, 2026), BTC bear (208 days, Jul 14 – Feb 7, 2026). This is not financial advice.

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P.S. — The single most important number in this entire article: $15,540. That's what $10,000 in Snuggle's WETH/USDC pool became during a bear market where ETH lost 55% of its value. HODL investors watched that same $10,000 become $4,500. The difference is $11,040. See it for yourself — it takes 30 seconds.