The Uniswap community will begin this Sunday one of the protocol's most important votes in 2026. Participants will decide whether to approve the activation of protocol fees in Uniswap v4 pools and the expansion of fees from versions v2 and v3 to Robinhood Chain, changes that could significantly increase the burning of the UNI token.
The vote will be held on-chain and will remain open until July 26. According to Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, the growth in trading volume, especially on Robinhood Chain, could accelerate the asset's burn rate. According to him, "we expect the impact on UNI burning to be substantial".
The first proposal authorizes the charging of fees in three categories of Uniswap v4 pools. The measure includes pools with fixed fees, pools launched through continuous compensation auctions, and pools with liquidity aggregation.
In this initial phase, the proposal covers the Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Polygon, Optimism, and Robinhood Chain networks. The other blockchains will be included later in a new proposal due to the technical limit of the GovernorBravo governance contract.
Another vote, presented by Hayden Adams, expands the charging of fees from versions v2 and v3 to Robinhood Chain. The network received all three versions of Uniswap at the mainnet launch, on July 1, and accumulated more than US$ 6 bilhões in swap volume by July 10.
Based on Arbitrum technology, Robinhood Chain operates as an Ethereum layer-2 solution. During its first week of operation, the network moved approximately US$ 3.1 billion, driven mainly by memecoin trading.
If approved, the fees collected will begin to feed the burn mechanism created by the governance update UNIfication, approved in December with 99.9% of votes in favor. At the time, the community authorized fees for v2 and v3 pools on the Ethereum mainnet and approved the burning of 100 million UNI tokens from the protocol treasury, leaving the implementation of v4 for a future vote.
Since then, the model has already been expanded to 11 blockchains. Last month, the protocol set a record by removing about 186 thousand UNI tokens from circulation in just one day.
Activating fees on Uniswap v4 required infrastructure different from previous versions. While v2 and v3 work with fixed fee tiers, the hooks architecture of v4 allows each pool to use variable fees, adjusted according to rules defined by governance.
To make this process more efficient, the proposal organizes pools into different families, allowing fees to be configured by category rather than individually. Both measures use the accelerated governance model approved by UNIfication, replacing the public consultation stage with a five-day Snapshot vote, followed by the final decision recorded on the blockchain. This format has been discussed by the community since February and marks another step in the evolution of the economics of the UNI token.