Trading volume surged 10x in one month, who is fueling UNI’s surge?

On August 31, UNI briefly broke through $5.4, setting a new high since January 2026. After falling to $2.31 in June this year, UNI has rebounded all the way, and its price has now risen more than 100% over the past 3 months. During the 2020-2021 DeFi wave, Uniswap was the top star DEX protocol, but in this cycle, it fell from grace, drew little discussion, and its token price long remained in a state of choppy decline.

What exactly has made UNI sought after by the market again?

Fee revenue of $4.29 million in the past 24 hours, daily stock token trading volume up 10x in one month

In July this year, Robinhood Chain’s mainnet went live. As of August 31, DefiLlama data shows its total TVL has risen above $700 million.

Uniswap officially announced that its v2, v3, v4, and UniswapX have been the primary public AMM on this chain since day one of Robinhood Chain, with web, wallet, and API available simultaneously.

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

Token Terminal provided even rarer data: Uniswap’s daily trading volume for stock tokens processed on Robinhood Chain hit a new high of about $130 million, up about 10x over the past month, with v3 and v4 volumes nearly equal.

More than $400,000 in UNI burned daily

UNI tokens were already fully unlocked back in 2024, yet the token price consistently performed only modestly.

Uniswap pools have always had fees. From 2020 to the end of 2025, almost all of that money went to liquidity providers (LPs). UNI was only used for voting. The protocol could generate hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars in fees per year, while the token itself had zero cash flow. That was the fee switch debated for five years.

In December 2025, the much-criticized UNI tokenomics finally went to a final vote and passed. The core contents included: after a voting period of about two days, burn 100 million UNI and turn on the protocol fee switch.

The latest Dune data shows that as of August 31, its cumulative burn amount was about 110 million tokens, with a total burned value of $630 million.

Since August this year, it has burned more than 100,000 UNI on multiple single days, with an average daily burned value exceeding $400,000, of which Robinhood Chain accounts for nearly half.

UNI’s burn is not simply using USDT/USDC or the like to directly buy back UNI tokens.

The fees in Uniswap pools still mostly go to LPs. Uniswap only takes a small slice. On Robinhood, it takes about 6%. That sliced-off portion does not go into Labs’ bank account, but into a contract jar called TokenJar. The jar contains ETH, stablecoins, altcoins, and stock coins, whatever each pool collects. Whoever wants to take things out of the jar must first burn an equivalent value of UNI.

This step is called Firepit.

Arbitrage bots monitor the net asset value in the TokenJar contract in real time, burn an equivalent amount of UNI to extract the fee assets, and sell them on the secondary market to complete risk-free arbitrage.

On-chain trading activity is positively correlated with the value captured by the protocol, which in turn drives more arbitrageurs to burn UNI to extract yield, forming a deflationary flywheel for the UNI token.

In other words, the official team turned “corporate buybacks” into “on-chain auction of protocol revenue.”

Dune data shows its burn figures are still growing steadily.

In order to save on the costs of its own market makers, and even more to avoid the SEC’s strict regulation of traditional brokers listing tokenized securities, Robinhood connected non-US retail and stock tokens to public AMMs rather than keeping them only in its own RFQ. Uniswap occupies an important position on Robinhood Chain. Robinhood Chain’s trading volume steadily turns into a net reduction in UNI, thereby driving the token price up.

Uniswap has long suffered from UNI being criticized for having zero cash flow. It needs real external revenue to support its deflationary model, while Robinhood happens to need a settlement layer with sufficient depth and decentralization to handle its stock tokens.

TradeFi and DeFi are deeply integrating.

Source: www.panewslab.com