Uniswap (UNI) ripped higher on Tuesday after Uniswap Labs founder Hayden Adams unveiled “UNIfication,” a sweeping governance proposal that would activate protocol fees and route them into coordinated token burns. The structural shift—combined with a sharp change in how Uniswap’s teams are organized, igniting an extremely bullish sentiment, with CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju arguing that a real supply shock could be incoming.
In a thread posted early Tuesday, Adams said he was “incredibly excited to make my first proposal to Uniswap governance,” describing a framework that “turns on protocol fees and aligns incentives across the Uniswap ecosystem.” He framed the move as the culmination of years of legal wrangling that had constrained Labs’ role: “UNI launched in 2020, but for the past 5 years Labs has been unable to meaningfully participate in Uniswap governance […] That ends today,” he wrote, adding that “the regulatory environment has shifted.”
The on-chain economics he outlined are unambiguous. Protocol usage would begin burning UNI; Unichain sequencer revenue would be directed to the same burn sink; and the treasury would immediately destroy 100 million UNI to account for fees that “could have been burned if fees were turned on at token launch.”
Adams also described new “protocol fee discount auctions” to improve LP outcomes and internalize MEV, and an “aggregator hooks” architecture in v4 that would let the protocol capture fees sourced from external liquidity.
In parallel, Uniswap Labs would stop charging fees on its interface, wallet, and API to push distribution and adoption, while Uniswap Foundation staff move to Labs under a growth mandate funded by the treasury. The net effect is a consolidation: Uniswap’s development, growth and fee policy would be operated under a single, explicitly token-aligned structure, with governance retaining control.
Adams cast the proposal as an existential scaling step: “I believe Uniswap protocol can be the primary place tokens are traded. This proposal sets the stage for the next decade of its growth […] Uniswap will ship relentlessly over the coming years and supercharge the ecosystem of developers, LPs, and traders,” he wrote.
According to estimates by MegaETH Labs member BREAD, if Uniswap were to modify its standard 0.3% trading fee so that 0.25% is allocated to liquidity providers and 0.05% directed toward UNI buybacks, the protocol could channel roughly $38 million into monthly repurchases. This projection is based on an annualized fee revenue of approximately $2.8 billion and would position Uniswap’s buyback capacity slightly above PUMP’s $35 million pace, yet still below HYPE’s $95 million benchmark.
At press time, UNI traded at $8.609.
