UNI has recently fallen to around $3.3, and an institution called Monetalis has come to light.
On-chain data shows that an address suspected to be associated with Monetalis recently transferred 3.72 million UNI to the market maker Cumberland. In November 2025, this firm took a major stake, with an average cost of about $7.7.
How did this batch of UNI come about?
On November 13, 2025, a wallet suspected to be associated with Monetalis received about 1.851 million UNI at an average price of $7.74, worth approximately $14.33 million. The next day, it received another 452,800 UNI at an average price of $7.81, worth about $3.54 million.
Then they started reducing their position:
January 2026: transferred out about 878,000 UNI, with an average price of around $6
February 2026: transferred out 500,000 tokens, average price around $5.75
End of February 2026: transferred out 325,000 tokens, average price around $3.82
Why did Monetalis dare to buy at $7.7?
What it’s betting on is Uniswap’s Fee Switch.
In November 2025, Uniswap launched the UNIfication plan. The core change is: the protocol starts taking a portion of the fees from trades, and then uses the TokenJar mechanism to buy back or burn UNI. At the same time, the plan also immediately burned 100 million UNI.
This effectively gives UNI its first value capture at the protocol level—from being purely a governance token to something that can share in protocol revenue.
Monetalis bet on this logic. But once the Fee Switch was implemented, why did UNI fall instead?
The problem is here: the story came through, but the income didn’t meet market expectations.
After the Fee Switch went live, the market’s focus shifted from “Uniswap can make money in the future” to “How much has Uniswap actually made?” Everyone started doing the detailed math—if trading volume can’t rise, protocol fee income will be limited, and UNI’s burn rate won’t speed up much either.
So the market found one thing: you can’t draw a direct equals sign between the Fee Switch and UNI’s big surge.
Also, one more thing needs to be made clear. UNI doesn’t directly distribute cash to token holders. The protocol’s revenue first goes into TokenJar, and then UNI is consumed through the mechanism; the UNI that gets consumed is burned. This is an indirect value return, not a dividend.
Moreover, the actual amount of UNI burned depends entirely on Uniswap’s trading volume and the protocol revenue, and it can change at any time.
This Monetalis trade might not have been a mistake about Uniswap—it may have been right about the direction—but it overestimated how fast the market would reprice this logic.
After the narrative is fulfilled, the valuation finally begins to be tested by reality.
At $7.7, the market is pricing “the endless imagination space of the Fee Switch.”
Now at $3.3, the market is pricing in “how much value the Fee Switch has generated so far.”
So whether UNI is worth watching next depends on more than just the Fee Switch story—don’t fixate only on that.
What you really should watch are three numbers:
① Uniswap’s actual protocol revenue
② UNI’s actual burn rate
③ The ratio between UNI market cap and protocol revenue
