Uniswap

UNI is the governance token of Uniswap, the largest decentralised exchange protocol.

Uniswap is a decentralised exchange: instead of an order book, traders swap tokens against pools of two assets supplied by liquidity providers, who earn the swap fees. This design is called an automated market maker (AMM). Uniswap runs on Ethereum and many other networks, and its latest version, v4, went live in January 2025. Over the year to 27 September 2026 it handled about $758 billion of swaps.

UNI is the governance token. It launched on 16 September 2020 with 1 billion tokens: 60% for the community (including an airdrop of 400 UNI to past users and a treasury run by token holders), 21.3% for the team, 18% for investors and 0.7% for advisors, with four-year vesting that has now ended. Holders vote, directly or by delegating their votes, on the treasury, on protocol fees and on any new issuance, which is capped at 2% a year and has never been used.

For five years all swap fees went to liquidity providers. In December 2025 holders approved "UNIfication": a small share of swap fees now goes to the protocol, and those fees can only be withdrawn by burning UNI. The treasury also burned 100 million UNI at once. By 27 September 2026 about 112 million UNI sat in the burn address. The same vote moved most Uniswap Foundation staff into Uniswap Labs, the company that builds the protocol, set Labs' own app fees to zero and gave Labs a budget of 20 million UNI a year.

The US securities regulator (SEC) investigated Uniswap Labs and in April 2024 warned it might sue, including over UNI being an unregistered security, but it closed the case without action in February 2025. Since September 2025 Uniswap governance has had a legal form in Wyoming (a nonprofit association called DUNI).