Uniswap Labs burned 100 million UNI from the protocol treasury around 04:30 UTC on Dec. 28, executing the UNIfication upgrade that routes protocol fees into UNI burning. Ethereum records of the burn transaction and a confirmation post on X show the tokens, worth roughly $600 million at execution, moving from the Uniswap UNI timelock to the 0x000…dEaD address.
UNI traded near $6.29 on Dec. 28, up about 6% over the prior 24 hours, with circulating supply now around 730 million tokens according to CoinMarketCap and on-chain supply dashboards that reflect the burn.
Some coverage framed the event as a 16% supply cut. The UNI contract on Etherscan still shows 1,000,000,000 UNI minted, and the burn moved exactly 100,000,000 of those to the dead address, so the hard number is 10% of total minted supply now sitting permanently at 0x000…dEaD.
UNIfication has been executed onchain. 100M UNI has been burned from the treasury. Fees are on for v2 and a set of v3 pools.
Uniswap Labs on X
The burn follows the UNIfication governance proposal that Uniswap DAO approved on Dec. 25. Delegates cast 125,342,017 UNI in favor and only 742 UNI against, a 99.9% approval rate that cleared the 40 million vote quorum for major protocol changes by a wide margin.
In the proposal, Uniswap Labs and the Uniswap Foundation pitched UNIfication as a way to link the protocol’s roughly $4 trillion in lifetime trading volume to UNI. The spec in the joint UNIfication blog post and the matching governance thread set a retroactive 100 million UNI treasury burn as an estimate of fees that would have been burned if the fee switch had been active since token launch.
Those write-ups also pointed to a friendlier U.S. regulatory climate and Uniswap governance’s adoption of a DUNA-based legal wrapper for the DAO as the backdrop. With that structure in place, the team argued the DAO could finally turn on protocol fees that reward UNI holders through burns instead of relying on interface fees at Uniswap Labs.
What changes for cash flows and LPs
Under UNIfication, Uniswap activates the long dormant fee switch on Ethereum mainnet v2 and a curated set of v3 pools that together cover roughly 80 to 95% of existing LP fees on mainnet. V2 LPs now earn 0.25% per swap instead of 0.30%, while the extra 0.05% accrues to the protocol. On v3, protocol fees start at one quarter of LP fees on 0.01% and 0.05% tiers and one sixth on 0.30% and 1.00% tiers, with governance able to tune parameters pool by pool.
Fees from those pools and net sequencer revenue from Unichain now flow into a pair of contracts called TokenJar and Firepit described in the UNIfication spec. TokenJar accumulates fee assets, and Firepit only releases them when UNI is burned, so every unit of protocol revenue that passes through the system lines up with an on-chain UNI burn.
DAO restructures around fee-driven UNI burns
UNIfication also rewires Uniswap’s organizational stack. Most Uniswap Foundation teams move under Uniswap Labs, which will run growth, community support, and governance work funded by a new 20 million UNI per year growth budget that starts in 2026, as outlined by the Foundation in its UNIfication note. Labs commits in the proposal to set interface, wallet, and API fees to zero and to focus commercial efforts on driving protocol usage that now feeds UNI burns.
That shift ends the phase where Uniswap monetized at the interface while UNI holders had no direct link to protocol cash flows. Going forward, DAO-approved protocol fees, Unichain sequencer revenue, and future fee sources such as Uniswap v4 aggregator hooks and Protocol Fee Discount Auctions route into the same burn pipeline described in the governance proposal.
Market reprices UNI’s new supply path
Markets had already started to price this in. UNI ripped more than 20% into the Christmas week vote as the proposal crossed quorum and large delegates such as Variant founder Jesse Walden, Synthetix and Infinex founder Kain Warwick, and former Uniswap engineer Ian Lapham publicly backed the change. The burn execution extended those gains, with UNI trading around $6.29 on Dec. 28, up about 6% on the day and roughly 25% above recent lows, while 24 hour volume sat near $300 million on centralized exchanges.
The burn leaves roughly 730 million UNI in circulation out of 1 billion minted, based on circulating supply figures on CoinMarketCap and Etherscan. At 2025 fee levels, third party projections from governance trackers and research desks that modeled UNIfication ahead of the vote put annual UNI burns in the hundreds of millions of dollars, with the exact pace now tied directly to realized Uniswap trading volume and Unichain activity.
Liquidity providers now face thinner per swap margins on the main Ethereum pools that feed the burn, especially on v2 where the entire extra 0.05% protocol fee comes out of the old 0.30% LP take. The DAO and Uniswap Labs will watch how depth and volumes respond and can adjust pool level protocol fees through further governance if liquidity starts to fragment toward rival venues.
