Original author: Ma He, Foresight News
On August 31, UNI briefly surged above $5.40, reaching its highest price since January 2026. After falling to $2.31 in June this year, UNI has rebounded steadily, with its price rising over 100% in the past three months. During the 2020–2021 DeFi boom, Uniswap was the leading DEX protocol, but in this cycle, it has lost its prominence, seen little discussion, and remained in a prolonged period of sideways movement and gradual decline.
What exactly has caused UNI to regain market favor?
Fee revenue over the past 24 hours reached $4.29 million, and daily trading volume of stock tokens increased tenfold over the past month.
In July this year, Robinhood Chain launched on mainnet, and as of August 31, data from DefiLlama shows its total TVL has surpassed $700 million.
Uniswap officially announced that its v2, v3, v4, and UniswapX have been the public primary AMM on Robinhood Chain since day one, with web, wallet, and API access available simultaneously.
Latest data shows that its revenue over the past 24 hours reached $4.29 million, accounting for nearly half of Robinhood Chain’s fee income during the same period, ranking second only to the token issuance platform Pons and significantly outpacing other competitors.
Token Terminal provided rarer data: Uniswap achieved a new daily trading volume high of approximately $130 million in stock tokens on Robinhood Chain, a tenfold increase over the past month, with trading volumes on v3 and v4 nearly equal.
Over $400,000 worth of UNI is burned daily.
The UNI token was fully unlocked as early as 2024, yet its price has consistently performed modestly.
Uniswap pools have always generated fees. From 2020 through the end of 2025, nearly all of this revenue went to liquidity providers (LPs). UNI was used solely for voting. The protocol generates hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars in fees annually, but the token itself produces zero cash flow. This is the fee switch debate that has lasted five years.
In December 2025, the widely criticized UNI tokenomics underwent its final vote and was approved, with key provisions including the burning of 100 million UNI tokens and the activation of the protocol fee switch following a two-day voting period.
Dune's latest data shows that, as of August 31, its cumulative burn volume reached approximately 110 million tokens, with a total burn value of $630 million.
Since August this year, it has burned over 100,000 UNI on multiple single days, with an average daily burn value exceeding $400,000, of which Robinhood Chain accounted for nearly half.
The burning of UNI is not simply a direct repurchase of UNI tokens using USDT/USDC, etc.
The majority of fees from Uniswap pools go to LPs; Uniswap takes only a small slice. Robinhood takes approximately 6%. This small slice does not go into Labs’ bank account but is directed into a contract called TokenJar, which holds ETH, stablecoins, altcoins, and stock tokens—whatever the respective pool collects. Anyone wishing to withdraw assets from the jar must first burn an equivalent amount of UNI.
This step is called Firepit.
The arbitrage bot continuously monitors the net asset value within the TokenJar contract, burns an equivalent amount of UNI to withdraw fee assets, and sells them on the secondary market to complete risk-free arbitrage.
On-chain transaction activity is positively correlated with protocol value capture, which in turn drives more arbitrageurs to burn UNI to extract profits, creating a deflationary flywheel for the UNI token.
In other words, the official has reclassified "company buybacks" as "on-chain auction protocol revenue."
Dune data shows that its burn data continues to grow steadily.
To eliminate the costs of its own market-making operations and avoid the SEC’s stringent regulations on traditional brokers listing tokenized securities, Robinhood connected its non-U.S. retail and tokenized stock orders to public AMMs rather than keeping them solely within its own RFQ system, making Uniswap a key player on Robinhood Chain. Trading volume on Robinhood Chain has consistently led to a net reduction in UNI supply, driving up its price.
Uniswap has long struggled with criticism that the UNI token generates zero cash flow; it needs real external revenue to support its deflationary model, while Robinhood requires a deep, sufficiently decentralized settlement layer to handle its stock tokens.
TradeFi and DeFi are deeply integrating.