Uniswap price soars as DAO votes to activate fee switch for 8 blockchains

Uniswap tokenholders on Thursday began voting on proposals that could give them access to millions of dollars in additional monthly revenue.

The price of the Uniswap token, UNI, has outperformed major cryptocurrencies over the past seven days, rising 9% in that span as of Friday afternoon New York time. Bitcoin and Ethereum, meanwhile, fell 3.5% and 2.4%, respectively.

The proposals would activate Uniswap’s so-called fee switch on two versions of the Uniswap protocol deployed across eight layer 2 blockchains: Base, Arbitrum, OP Mainnet, World Chain, X Layer, Celo, Soneium, and Zora.

Activation of the fee switch would direct at least one-sixth of the fees collected on those blockchains from liquidity providers to a so-called token jar, where they can be claimed by investors who burn, or destroy, Uniswap tokens of equal value.

The fee switch has been active on v2 and the largest v3 trading pools on Ethereum since late December. It has generated a cumulative $3.3 million since then, according to DefiLlama data.

The proposal — which also seeks to flip the fee switch on all remaining v3 pools on Ethereum — would likely double that revenue. Base has overtaken Ethereum as the top fee-generating blockchain for Uniswap in 2026, with traders there paying $55 million across all four versions of Uniswap since January 1. Traders using Uniswap on Ethereum have paid just $37 million in fees in that span.

Uniswap is the largest decentralised exchange. It processed transactions worth more than $1.7 billion over the past 24 hours and more than $69 billion over the past month.

Founder Hayden Adams said the rollout of the fee switch on Ethereum had been a success, citing the growth in user deposits in crypto terms. (Deposits fell in dollar terms due to the collapse in the value of Ether over the past month.)

“Since UNIfication, we’ve monitored the first wave of fees on v2 and a large subset of v3 pools on mainnet,” Adams wrote on X, referring to the title of the November proposal that flipped the fee switch on Ethereum.

“Rollout went very well, with market adjusted [user deposits] up and burn working efficiently.”

After years of debate, Uniswap leadership proposed a fee switch in November. By encouraging Uniswap investors to destroy their tokens in exchange for protocol-generated fees, it reduces the UNI supply and, in theory, boosts its value.

But UNI has plummeted along with the rest of the crypto market since UNIfication was proposed, falling 59% to $3.74.

The wide-ranging proposal did more than flip the fee switch on Ethereum. It also burned almost 100 million UNI, the amount of tokens that would have been removed from circulation had the fee switch been implemented since Uniswap’s inception several years ago.

UNIfication also approved the development of a new mechanism to boost liquidity provider earnings, the eventual disbandment of the Uniswap Foundation, and the end of Uniswap Labs’ collection of additional fees from interfaces that allow non-technical traders to use the Uniswap protocol, including a Labs-built website and crypto wallet.

The proposal to expand the fee switch passed an initial vote unanimously. A final pair of votes ends on March 4.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.