UNI is my unresolved longing from 2026. I know its changes and expectations, yet the market washed me out of the car. When many people hear “altcoins” now, the first reaction is to stay away. This disappointment is hard to understand, but it’s easy to explain: after some coins fall 90%, they can still fall another 90%; the team keeps switching narratives, while holders never get the returns brought by business growth. But researching a project can’t mean you stay forever in the last cycle. Uniswap is an example worth revisiting: the protocol has been continuously upgraded, and the relationship between UNI and protocol revenue has also undergone a real, substantive change.
In the past, the biggest pain point for UNI holders was that there was a missing link between product success and token rewards. Users trade on it; the providers earn trading fees; usage of the protocol keeps growing. But simply holding UNI doesn’t automatically share those revenues. Uniswap can be a great product, but UNI doesn’t necessarily become a great investment as a result.
To clearly see today’s changes, you need to split its development over these years into two lines: one is that the trading product keeps improving, and the other is that the token’s economic mechanisms have finally begun to catch up.
UNI was issued in 2020 and primarily served governance functions. Token holders can participate in protocol governance, including deciding whether to open fee switches—but having control of the switch doesn’t mean they’ve already obtained revenue. In 2021, v3 introduced concentrated liquidity, allowing capital to be concentrated in specified price ranges, improving effective capital utilization. This strengthened Uniswap’s competitiveness, but it didn’t automatically solve the question of how UNI benefits.
UniswapX, launched in 2023, starts letting different executioners compete on quotes to find better trading routes. Then v4,上线 in 2025, further allows developers to use Hooks—that is, customizable functionality modules—to design different fee structures and execution rules for trading pools. In simple terms, Uniswap is gradually evolving from a simple token-swapping tool into infrastructure where other developers can also build trading products on top of it.
What truly changes the investment logic for UNI is the UNIfication reform proposed in November 2025 and then gradually rolled out. It connects protocol fee collection with UNI burning. According to DefiLlama’s enablement records, Ethereum v2/v3 started charging fees from December 28, 2025; in March 2026 it expanded to multiple Layer 2 networks; in June it further expanded to Polygon, BNB Chain, and Celo; and in July it also covered the relevant fee collection for v4 and Robinhood Chain. Token enablement has moved beyond the stage of mere discussion and voting, and has begun to have real revenue backing.
This mechanism isn’t complicated: the assets collected by the protocol go into on-chain contracts. If participants want to claim these assets, they need to submit and burn the corresponding UNI. The economic effect is close to buyback-and-burn funded by revenue. Holders won’t automatically receive cash dividends as a result, but the business revenue begins to flow to UNI by reducing token supply. Note that the fee rate, coverage, and related configurations are still subject to governance, so you can’t treat all trading volume as already contributing revenue to UNI.
The reform plan also incorporates the Unichain sequencer’s income into the burn design after deducting specified costs and revenue sharing, and schedules a one-time burn of 100 million treasury UNI. These two positive developments should be viewed separately: burning treasury tokens reduces potential supply, which doesn’t mean the market generates buy pressure of the same scale. Sustaining the use of business revenue to support burning is the part that’s more worth tracking in the long run. Any contributions related to Unichain should also be accounted for based on actual execution and funds received.
Therefore, between Uniswap’s business and UNI, there is finally a verifiable transmission path: increased trading demand leads to more revenue from fee-enabled businesses; that revenue supports more burning. But this still isn’t a formula where the stronger the project is, the higher the token price must go. The speed of revenue growth, the scale of token releases, and the valuation the market has already assigned will all affect the final investment return.
In my view, Uniswap’s biggest moat is liquidity—along with the trading entry points and developer ecosystem formed around liquidity. With the same trade, whoever can offer a better execution price will attract more capital to go there. Deeper, more effective liquidity attracts more trades; more trades create more fees, which then have an opportunity to attract more capital to stay. Integration with wallets, aggregators, and other platforms keeps bringing in orders to this system.
The code can be copied, but the integrated relationships between liquidity, trading habits, development tools, and long-term accumulation are very hard to copy all at once. The significance of v4 is to give more teams reasons to build products around Uniswap, further increasing the value of these relationships. Of course, this moat isn’t unbreakable: aggregators can route orders to better-priced venues at any time, and liquidity will chase better returns. Uniswap must continuously prove that it’s worth using.
The biggest game here is the balance of incentives between UNI holders and liquidity providers. The protocol takes a portion of fees; in the short term, that can increase burning. But if the people providing capital can’t earn sufficient returns, they will withdraw liquidity, and the execution experience and trading volume may decline. Therefore, a truly healthy flywheel must benefit traders, liquidity providers, and token holders alike—not just for cosmetically good numbers on burning at the expense of the protocol’s own competitiveness.
This is also why technical upgrades still matter. For example, the StablePair Hook went live in September this year. It attempts to preserve more of the value that would otherwise flow to arbitrageurs by using dynamic fee rates. What it aims to solve is: while improving the trading experience, make providing liquidity more attractive. Whether it can achieve this ultimately needs to be validated by real operating data.
Looking ahead, I care more about whether Uniswap can capture trading demand beyond crypto speculation. Stablecoin swaps, tokenized assets, and other financial applications could all expand its market. Uniswap has expanded to Robinhood Chain and, on the product side, supports more tokenized assets. In the future, users may complete trades inside wallets or financial applications without directly opening Uniswap, but the underlying layer will still use Uniswap’s liquidity and trading protocol. If this kind of usage can continue to contribute protocol revenue, UNI’s long-term logic will be more solid.
Valuation also can’t be skipped. Using the query scope as of September 21: UNI’s circulating market cap is about $5.5 billion, and the fully diluted valuation is about $7.8 billion. Uniswap’s protocol revenue over the last 30 days is about $15.81 million. If you simply annualize this revenue, it’s about $192 million, corresponding to roughly 2.8x the circulating market cap and 4.1x the fully diluted valuation. This ratio isn’t a stock P/E, nor does it fully account for operating and incentive costs; it can only serve as an observation benchmark. At minimum, it shows the market has already paid some premium for UNI’s changes.
The supply side must be counted together, too. The reform plan allocates an annual growth budget of 20 million UNI, sourced from the treasury. While this isn’t new minting, you also can’t assume that all of it will be sold immediately after allocation—but once funded, it may increase circulation pressure. In addition, the original design of UNI preserves a future token issuance plan, so the actual situation needs to be verified against execution records. To judge whether burning has value, you must look at burning, issuance, and treasury outflows together—not just a single cumulative burning number.
My expectation is that Uniswap has the opportunity to evolve from an on-chain trading tool into foundational infrastructure behind more financial applications; meanwhile, UNI has the opportunity to shift from a token mainly dependent on governance and expectation-based pricing to one supported more by actual revenue. How far this road can go depends on whether it can defend its competitiveness after fees, and whether revenue growth can keep up with valuation. If, in the next few quarters, trading share holds steady, protocol revenue grows, and burning can absorb the新增 circulation, then the logic will be strengthening continuously. Conversely, if it’s only the token price rising while the business doesn’t keep up, expectations will turn into a burden.
Many people have given up on meme or copycat coins because they’ve seen too many stories of falling 90%, then falling another 90%. But projects in the market haven’t stopped diverging: some still rely on narratives and token issuance to survive, while others have fundamentally changed through technical upgrades, product iterations, and reforms to economic mechanisms. They may not all succeed, but they are worth revisiting.
I don’t think all altcoins will come back. What’s truly worth looking for are those projects whose operations are improving, whose benefits are starting to flow to token holders, yet whose price still hasn’t fully reflected the changes. Identifying such changes early is still possible to become a wealth opportunity.
