Uniswap's Fee Switch Spins Up, Sending UNI Price Soaring
The Uniswap governance proposal UNIfication was executed on December 28, 2025, marking a turning point for the DeFi exchange. The protocol fee switch was activated, directing a portion of trading fees from Ethereum mainnet v2 pools and certain v3 pools to the protocol.
A total of 100 million UNI was burned from the treasury in one go as retroactive compensation for the 'free era'. Uniswap Labs reduced its frontend, wallet, and API fees to zero while receiving an annual growth budget of 20 million UNI.
The data wasn't compelling enough yet. In the first 12 days after the fee switch was enabled, the cumulative value of UNI burned was only around $800,000, translating to an annualized figure of approximately $26-27 million, corresponding to a yearly burn of roughly 4-5 million UNI.
The change came in July. On July 1, Robinhood Chain officially launched, with Uniswap's v2, v3, v4, and UniswapX deployed on day one. This chain pushed Uniswap's daily trading volume to $500 million within eight days, with cumulative volume surpassing $1 billion by July 10.
On July 27, the v4 fee switch was officially activated. The effect was immediate: according to DefiLlama data, protocol revenue nearly tripled after activation, with daily funds flowing toward UNI burns rising from approximately $114,000 in early July to $325,000.