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Uniswap is once again making headlines in the DeFi sector after Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs, announced a major governance proposal to activate protocol fees and align incentives across the Uniswap ecosystem. The announcement sent shockwaves through the market, with UNI’s price surging more than 50% in the hours following the news — reflecting renewed optimism among investors and traders.
In a post shared on X, Adams reflected on Uniswap’s evolution: “Uniswap has been my passion and singular focus for the past 8 years. What started as a small side project is now global financial infrastructure powering thousands of applications with ~$1.8 trillion in annual trading.”
Since UNI’s launch in 2020, Uniswap Labs has been largely unable to meaningfully participate in governance, constrained by regulatory pressures that Adams said cost “thousands of hours and tens of millions in legal fees.” Now, with the regulatory environment shifting, those limitations appear to be easing.
In his new governance proposal, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams outlined a sweeping plan to overhaul how the protocol operates, distributes value, and aligns incentives across its ecosystem. “At a high level,” Adams explained, the proposal seeks to activate protocol fees and direct them toward UNI burns, creating a sustainable mechanism for value accrual.
The plan also includes sending Unichain sequencer fees to the UNI burn, further tightening the token’s supply, and burning 100 million UNI from the treasury, representing the fees that could have been burned if the mechanism had been active since launch. Another major component introduces Protocol Fee Discount Auctions, a new feature designed to improve liquidity provider (LP) outcomes and capture MEV (miner extractable value) directly for the protocol.
Adams also proposes “aggregator hooks” for Uniswap v4, turning it into an on-chain aggregator capable of collecting fees from external liquidity sources — a move that could expand Uniswap’s reach across the DeFi ecosystem. Beyond these technical changes, the proposal redefines the role of Uniswap Labs, directing it to focus exclusively on protocol growth and governance-aligned initiatives, while ending fee collection on its interface, wallet, and API to encourage wider adoption.
Finally, the plan would merge Foundation employees into Labs under a new growth fund and move governance-owned Unisocks liquidity to v4 on Unichain, where it would be burned.
However, not everyone sees this as purely bullish. Some analysts argue the move reflects growing pressure from rivals like Aerodrome Finance, whose rapid ecosystem expansion has drawn liquidity away from Uniswap. From this perspective, the proposal may represent both a bold strategic pivot and a defensive play to reassert Uniswap’s dominance in a fast-evolving DeFi landscape.
