From Intent to LP Tokens: The Uniswap V2 Mint Process

If you've been following along, we've covered what AMMs are and how the constant product formula works, then took a detour to map out the contract architecture before diving in. This is the third post in the series, and the first one where we actually get into a flow end to end. We're starting with Mint — adding liquidity to a pool. In practice, this is where a lot of DeFi begins. Liquidity providers deposit tokens into pools and earn a share of the fees generated by swaps. Protocols build on top of this — routing trades, sourcing prices, or deploying their own liquidity as part of larger strategies. A surprising amount of “yield” in the ecosystem traces back to this one operation. The full path for this operation, as a reminder from the map post: User → Router → Pair → User. That's the skeleton. Everything below is what happens inside each of those steps. Starting at the Router: addLiquidity() Everything starts when a user calls addLiquidity() on UniswapV2Router02. The function signat