Uniswap governance votes on v4 fees across 11 chains after 93% approval

Uniswap DAO votes July 19 on activating v4 protocol fees across 11 chains and extending v2 and v3 fees to Robinhood Chain.

"Both direct all new protocol fees into the existing UNI burn mechanism. Based on current volumes, especially Robinhood, we expect the impact on UNI burn to be substantial," Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs, said on X.

The v4 proposal targets static-fee pools, continuous clearing auction pools, and aggregator-hook pools on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Robinhood, BNB Chain, Polygon and Optimism, with a second batch covering five additional chains to follow. A separate proposal would enable v2 and v3 fees on Robinhood Chain, where Uniswap deployments passed $6 billion in cumulative swap volume within 10 days of the chain's July 1 mainnet launch, per the proposal text. The votes follow a temperature check where 93% of participants backed the move, with 13.9 million UNI in favor versus 1 million against.

If approved, the fees would feed the burn mechanism established under December's UNIfication overhaul, which turned on protocol fees for v2 and v3 on Ethereum mainnet and burned 100 million UNI from the treasury. Uniswap recorded a single-day record of 186,000 UNI burned from v2 and v3 fees last month, and expanding collections to v4 across 11 chains would materially increase that rate. Voting runs from July 19 through July 26.

The fee activation introduces new infrastructure for v4, which uses a hook architecture that lets pools charge variable fees from one block to the next. Unlike v2 and v3's fixed fee tiers, the proposal creates a governance-controlled system that sorts pools into "families" and computes each pool's fee from a set of rules, according to the proposal text.

Not all stakeholders support the expansion. Gamma Strategies, a liquidity provider, opposed the v4 fee proposals, arguing that v4 still lags v3 in volumes and faces increasing competition from automated market makers, RFQ systems and order-book DEXes. "It still lags Uniswap V3 in terms of volumes, and there's evermore increasing competition," Gamma said in its opposition.

The tension highlights a structural imbalance in Uniswap's economics. Liquidity providers have accrued over $5 billion in cumulative fees since 2018, while the protocol itself has generated only $25 million in cumulative revenue, according to DefiLlama. Activating fees on v4 would shift a portion of that flow toward UNI holders through the burn mechanism.

UNI traded at $3.51 as of Friday, roughly flat over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. The token surged 41% in July from $2.70 to $3.80 before stalling below its 200-day moving average, with traders watching for renewed Robinhood Chain momentum and the fee vote outcome as potential triggers for the next move.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.