# Collecting fees you have already earned requires borrowing money

> On a leveraged Uniswap position, taking the fees you are owed needs a flash loan first. Not a quirk of ours — a consequence of what collateral means.

- Source: https://defiloops.com/blog/collecting-fees-you-have-already-earned-requires-borrowing-money
- Published: 2026-09-16
- Category: Architecture
- Tags: uniswap, leverage, flash-loans, liquidity
- Author: DeFiLoops

---
Your liquidity position has earned three hundred dollars in fees. The fees are yours. Nobody
disputes that they are yours.

If the position has been borrowed against, you cannot simply take them.

## Why not

The position is collateral. Every part of it backs the loan, and the accrued fees are part of
it. Withdrawing them makes the collateral smaller, and a lender that let you quietly shrink
the thing securing its loan would not be a lender for long.

So the vault will not release the fees while the debt stands. The debt cannot be cleared
without money. The money is, in part, the fees.

<Callout type="note" title="This is the same shape as every other one">
  Repay to release, release to repay. It is the deadlock that runs through the whole levered
  family, showing up in the most innocuous operation on the list.
</Callout>

## How it is done anyway

Borrow the repayment for the length of one transaction, clear the debt, take the fees, restore
the borrowing, repay the loan. One press, and the fees arrive.

The borrowed money comes from Morpho, which lends flash for nothing while Aave charges a
premium. One detail worth stating precisely: **Morpho lends it to the adapter, not to your
account.** The borrowed sum never touches the account at any point in the transaction, so
there is no instant at which it is yours and no instant at which it could go anywhere else.

## The part that is worth internalising

There is a habit of thinking about leverage as something that affects your *returns* — bigger
gains, bigger losses, a liquidation price to watch. It also changes what you are permitted to
do with your own position, and that second cost is the one nobody prices in.

Under leverage, routine maintenance stops being routine:

<Spec rows={[
  ['Collecting fees', 'Needs the debt cleared first'],
  ['Adding liquidity', 'Needs the debt cleared first'],
  ['Moving the range', 'Needs the position burned, which needs the debt cleared first'],
  ['Splitting the position', 'Same'],
]} />

Every one of those is a flash loan in this system, and the reason there are fourteen
flash-funded operations rather than two.

<Callout type="warn" title="What this costs you">
  Nothing in interest — Morpho charges nothing for the flash — but it is a more complex
  transaction than the unlevered version, and a more expensive one in gas. Collecting fees
  every day on a levered position is unlikely to be worth it. Collecting on a schedule, or
  when the amount justifies the trip, is.
</Callout>