Uniswap
An automated market maker for onchain spot trading, deployed across Ethereum and several layer-2 networks, and since December 2025 the collector of a protocol fee on the swaps it routes.
The economic model
For five years Uniswap generated fees and kept none of them. Liquidity providers earned the swap fee; the protocol fee existed in the code but was never switched on, which is why the DAO watched roughly $4tn of cumulative volume pass through without a claim on it. UNIfication, approved in December 2025 with 99.9% of participating votes, changed that. In v2 the LP fee falls from 0.30% to 0.25% and the protocol takes the remaining 0.05%; in v3 the protocol fee is set at a quarter of the LP fee in the 0.01% and 0.05% tiers and a sixth in the 0.30% and 1% tiers. Unichain sequencer fees, after layer-1 data costs and the 15% owed to Optimism, are routed to the same place.
The mechanism by which value reaches UNI is destruction, not distribution. Protocol fees accumulate in immutable TokenJar contracts, and the Firepit contract releases them only when an equivalent value of UNI is burned in the same transaction. Nobody receives a payment; the supply falls. A retroactive burn of 100m UNI from the treasury in December 2025, worth roughly $557m at the time, took cumulative burns to about 10.1% of the original 1bn supply, and the largest single day since then destroyed 134,000 UNI. Scale matters here: Talos measured $0.8m of protocol fees in the first 12 days, an annualised run rate near $26m to $27m, and DefiLlama put annualised protocol revenue at $47.66m on 25 July 2026 against $850.42m of fees paid to liquidity providers. The DAO's share of the venue's economics is small.
Risk stays with liquidity providers, and the fee switch made their position marginally worse. They bear inventory risk and adverse selection against better-informed flow, they now keep a smaller share of the fee that compensates them for it, and the protocol assumes none of it. Protocol Fee Discount Auctions are intended to return some of the value that currently leaks to searchers, which the proposal estimated at $0.06 to $0.26 per $10,000 traded. UNI itself carries no claim on assets and no entitlement to cash: what it has is a governance vote and a mechanically shrinking supply that governance could vote to stop.
How it is governed
Onchain governance by UNI holders through the Uniswap DAO. Under the UNIfication proposal the Uniswap Foundation's teams moved to Uniswap Labs, which now maintains the protocol, interfaces and developer relations, leaving the DAO with parameter and treasury authority.
Where it runs
Ethereum, Unichain, Base, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Polygon and other EVM networks
The numbers
Each figure as published by the source named on the row. Protocol metrics are especially prone to double-counting; where a provider states a caveat, it is carried here.
| Metric | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total value locked | $3.14bn | 25 July 2026 | DefiLlama: Uniswap |
| Trading volume, trailing 30 days | $42.7bn | 25 July 2026 | DefiLlama: Uniswap |
| Annualised fees paid to liquidity providers | $850m | 25 July 2026 | DefiLlama: Uniswap |
| Annualised protocol revenue | $47.7m | 25 July 2026 | DefiLlama: Uniswap |
| Cumulative UNI burned as a share of original supply | 10.10% | 13 January 2026 | Talos: State of the Network: Uniswap flips the fee switch |
Reading protocol metrics
Value locked, fees and volume are computed differently by every provider, and the same activity often appears in two of them. We publish the provider's own figure with its method attached rather than reconciling the difference into a number nobody published.