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Trading Volume in January Surges 10X, Who Is Driving UNI's Soaring Price?

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UNI price has recently surged, mainly driven by the significant increase in Uniswap trading volume and fee revenue on the Robinhood Chain, as well as the continuous burning of UNI through the protocol fee switch, enhancing the deflationary expectations for the token.

Original Title: "Trading Volume Up 10x in January, Who Is Fueling UNI's Surge?"
Original Author: Mach, Foresight News

On August 31, UNI surged above $5.4, hitting a new price high since January 2026. After dropping to $2.31 in June this year, UNI has been on a steady rise, with its price increasing by over 100% in the past 3 months. Uniswap was the leading DEX protocol in the 2020-2021 DeFi boom, but in this current cycle, it fell from grace, with little discussion and its price remaining in a long-term bearish state.

What exactly has caused UNI to once again attract market attention?

24-Hour Fee Revenue Reaches $4.29 million, Stock Token Daily Trading Volume Up 10x in a Month

In July this year, the Robinhood Chain mainnet went live, and as of August 31, DefiLlama data shows its total TVL has exceeded $700 million.

Uniswap has officially announced that its v2, v3, v4, and UniswapX have been public AMMs on the Robinhood Chain since day one, with web interfaces, wallets, and APIs synchronized and available.

The latest data shows that its revenue in the past 24 hours was $4.29 million, accounting for nearly half of Robinhood Chain's fee revenue in the past 24 hours, second only to the token issuance platform Pons, significantly ahead of other competitors.

Token Terminal has provided even rarer data: Uniswap's daily trading volume of stock tokens on the Robinhood Chain has hit a new high of around $130 million, up about 10x in the past month, with v3 and v4 trading volumes almost unchanged.

Daily Burn of Over $40,000 Worth of UNI

The UNI token had been fully unlocked as early as 2024, yet its price performance had been mediocre.

There has always been a fee in the Uniswap pool. From 2020 to the end of 2025, almost all of this money will go to the liquidity providers (LP). UNI is only used for voting. The protocol can generate fees ranging from hundreds of millions to tens of billions of dollars per year, and the token itself has zero cash flow. This is the fee switch that has been debated for five years.

In December 2025, the much-criticized UNI tokenomics underwent a final vote and was approved, with key points including the burning of 1 billion UNI after a roughly two-day voting window and the activation of a protocol fee switch.

Recent data from Dune shows that as of August 31, the total burned amount was around 110 million UNI, amounting to a total burn value of $630 million.

Since August of this year, there have been multiple days where over 100,000 UNI were burned, with a daily average burn value exceeding $400,000, and Robinhood Chain contributing nearly half of this.

The burning of UNI is not simply a direct buyback using USDT/USDC or similar assets.

The majority of the fees in the Uniswap pool still go to LPs. Uniswap only takes a small cut. Robinhood takes roughly 6%. The portion that is cut does not go to the Labs' bank account but goes into a contract jar called TokenJar. The jar contains ETH, stablecoins, altcoins, stock tokens—whatever the pool takes. Anyone who wants to withdraw from the jar must first burn an equivalent amount of UNI.

This process is called the Firepit.

Arbitrage bots monitor the asset value in real-time within the TokenJar contract, burn an equivalent amount of UNI to extract fee assets, and then conduct risk-free arbitrage by selling on the secondary market.

The on-chain trading activity is positively correlated with captured protocol value, thereby encouraging more arbitrageurs to burn UNI to extract profits, creating a UNI token deflationary spiral.

In other words, the official "company buyback" has been transformed into "on-chain auction protocol revenue."

Dune's data shows that its burn data continues to steadily increase.

To save costs for its own market makers and to avoid the SEC's strict regulations on traditional brokerage-backed tokenized securities, Robinhood has connected non-U.S. retail and stock tokenization to a public AMM, rather than keeping them only in their own RFQ. Uniswap plays a significant role on the Robinhood Chain. The transaction volume on the Robinhood Chain has consistently turned into a net reduction of UNI, thereby driving the coin's price up.

Uniswap has long been criticized for its UNI token's lack of cash flow, needing real external revenue to support its deflationary model, while Robinhood coincidentally requires a large, deep, and sufficiently decentralized settlement layer to handle its stock tokens.

TradeFi and DeFi are deeply integrated.