Uniswap V3’s “Collect” Is Correct — and Still Misleading

Uniswap V3 introduced concentrated liquidity, NFTs for positions, and a much more expressive — but also more subtle — event model.

One consequence of this design is that on-chain events can be perfectly correct, yet still semantically confusing for end-users.

A common example is the Collect action.

The Common Assumption

For many users (and even some dashboards):

`collect() = collect earned fees`

A Uniswap V3 position is an NFT that tracks:

When a user wants to exit a position, the flow usually looks like:

event: burn - emit with leftover liquidity amount
event: collect fee - emit with leftover liquidity amount + fees earned (the magic thing is here )

From the protocol’s point of view, this is perfectly valid:

everything owed to the position is paid out

all values are emitted correctly in event logs

But semantically, fees and principal are very different concepts.

Most explorers (Etherscan included) do the right thing at the log level:

The problem is not decoding accuracy.

The problem is that:

For an end-user, seeing:

raises a very different interpretation than:

Sample transaction:

You cannot reliably separate fees vs liquidity by:

To do this correctly, you need to:

Events remain low-level and composable

Meaning emerges only when state is reconstructed

UX gaps grow between “what happened” and “what users think happened”

For data builders, this is a reminder:

Accurate decoding is the baseline.

Semantic decoding is where real understanding begins.