UNI has doubled in price since the beginning of June. What supported the growth of the Uniswap asset
The native token of Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange, has gained around 100% over the past two months, significantly outperforming Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other leading cryptocurrencies. UNI's growth coincided with the expansion of the project's ecosystem, the launch of solutions for tokenized assets, and an increase in token burn volumes.
At the beginning of June, UNI's price fell to approximately $2.3, one of its lowest levels in the past six years. The token was under pressure due to UNI's weak connection to the revenue generated by the Uniswap exchange itself. For a long time, the token was primarily used for project governance and did not give holders a direct share of Uniswap's fees. After that, the token entered an almost uninterrupted upward trend and briefly approached $4.6 by July 31.
Over the past month, UNI has risen by approximately 50%, and since the beginning of June, it has nearly doubled. By comparison, Bitcoin has gained around 9% since the beginning of July, while Ethereum has risen by approximately 20%.
At the same time, the token's long-term performance remains negative. Since the beginning of 2026, UNI has fallen by almost 25%, while compared with the beginning of 2025, its price has declined by approximately 70%.
This decline may have been associated with a general cooling of interest in the decentralized finance sector, reduced trading activity on DEX platforms, and increased competition from other protocols, including PancakeSwap, Curve Finance, and Aerodrome. Additional pressure on the price came from overall cryptocurrency market volatility and profit-taking by investors following previous periods of growth.
Uniswap remains the largest decentralized exchange
Uniswap ranks first among decentralized trading platforms by transaction volume. As of the end of July 2026, the exchange's daily turnover amounted to approximately $1.5 billion, while the total value of user assets deposited in the protocol exceeded $3 billion.
Uniswap is available across nearly 50 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and Polygon. Its broad presence across different networks allows Uniswap to attract users regardless of which ecosystem they use to hold and exchange assets.
In terms of trading volume, Uniswap is already comparable to the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, OKX, Bybit, and Coinbase.
What may have supported the UNI price
In June, there were almost no major announcements related to Uniswap that could directly explain the beginning of the token's growth. One notable event was a forecast by analysts at the British bank Standard Chartered, who suggested that UNI could rise to $100 by 2030.
The forecast is based on expectations of rapid growth in the market for tokenized real-world assets, or RWA*. Standard Chartered estimates that the market could expand from approximately $340 billion to $4 trillion by 2028, while the share of such assets used in DeFi could increase from 3.5% to 30% by 2030. As a result, the total value of assets in decentralized protocols could approach $2.7 trillion. Analysts consider Uniswap one of the main potential beneficiaries of this process.
* RWA, or Real World Assets, are assets from the traditional economy whose ownership rights are transferred to a blockchain and represented as digital tokens. Such a token may confirm ownership of the asset itself, a share in it, or the right to receive income associated with it. Examples of RWAs include tokenized stocks and bonds, investment fund shares, real estate, gold, commodities, debt obligations, and government securities.
Standard Chartered expects UNI to rise gradually: to $6.5 by the end of 2026, $20 in 2027, $40 in 2028, $65 in 2029, and $100 by the end of 2030. However, this scenario depends on the actual development of the tokenized asset market, increased activity in DeFi, and Uniswap's ability to maintain its leading position among trading protocols.
At the end of July, the Uniswap team introduced a dedicated solution for institutional investors called Permissioned Pools. It is designed for trading regulated assets*, including tokenized company shares and investment fund interests.
* Regulated assets are assets whose issuance, sale, and circulation are governed by law and supervised by authorized regulatory bodies. These include company shares, bonds, investment fund units and interests, as well as tokenized versions of these instruments. To process transactions involving such assets, a platform must verify the user's identity, country of residence, qualified investor status, and source of funds.
The project's partner is Securitize, the company that acts as the issuer of BlackRock's tokenized BUIDL fund, which is backed by short-term US government bonds.
The main feature of Permissioned Pools is that access to transactions within such pools is granted not to all users, but only to pre-approved participants. Verification is conducted at the smart-contract level: before a transaction is completed, the system automatically determines whether a specific wallet has passed the required identity checks and whether it is included in the list of permitted addresses.
If the wallet meets the established requirements, the user can buy, sell, or provide liquidity. If the address has not passed verification, the smart contract automatically rejects the transaction. This mechanism allows Uniswap's infrastructure to be used for trading regulated assets, such as tokenized stocks or funds, where participant identification requirements must be observed.
Integration with Robinhood Chain
Another important event was the launch of Robinhood Chain in early July by the US brokerage company Robinhood. The new network is focused on the issuance and circulation of tokenized real-world assets.
From the network's first day of operation, Uniswap became the main platform for exchanging assets on Robinhood Chain.
In less than a month, Uniswap's trading volume on this network approached $13 billion. This represents more than a quarter of the protocol's total turnover across all supported blockchains.
This level of activity demonstrated that Uniswap is capable of occupying a key position in the infrastructure for trading tokenized stocks and other traditional financial instruments.
UNI token burning
Another factor supporting the price was the token burn program launched as part of the UNIfication proposal at the end of 2025.
Token burning refers to the permanent removal of cryptocurrency from circulation. To do this, tokens are transferred to a special address that no one can access. These assets can no longer be returned to the market.
Under the token burn mechanism, part of the protocol's revenue is used to buy UNI on the market and subsequently destroy the purchased tokens. By reducing the number of available tokens, the program could potentially increase UNI's scarcity. If demand for the token remains stable or grows, the reduction in supply may support its price, as buyers have to compete for a smaller number of UNI tokens.
The buyback itself also has an additional effect, as it creates regular demand for the token from the protocol. However, price growth is not guaranteed and still depends on the state of the cryptocurrency market, trading activity on Uniswap, and investor interest in UNI.
Almost 108 million UNI have accumulated at Uniswap's burn address. Since the beginning of July, several dozen tokens have been destroyed daily in most cases, although on certain days the burn volume reached hundreds of thousands of UNI.
New fee in Uniswap v4
On July 27, 2026, Uniswap introduced an additional fee collection mechanism in the fourth version of the protocol, Uniswap v4.
Following the update, Uniswap began allocating more funds generated from trading fees to UNI buybacks and token burns. As a result, the value of tokens removed from circulation each day increased approximately threefold and reached $325,000. The higher the protocol's trading activity, the more fees it receives and the more UNI it may potentially buy back and destroy.
However, the new model caused controversy among liquidity providers, users who deposit their assets into trading pools and receive a portion of the fees in return. Some of them believed that the additional protocol fee would be deducted from their rewards, reducing their returns.
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams described these concerns as misinformation. According to him, the new fee is not deducted from liquidity providers' rewards but is added on top of them.
Adams explained that liquidity providers continue to receive a fee of 30 basis points, while the protocol additionally charges another 5 basis points. As a result, the protocol's share amounts to approximately 14% of the total fees collected.
Conclusion
Several factors drove UNI's growth at once: the expansion of the Uniswap ecosystem, its entry into the tokenized asset segment, the integration with Robinhood Chain, and increased token burn volumes. At the same time, UNI's future performance will depend on whether Uniswap can maintain its leadership among DEX platforms and convert growing trading activity into sustainable demand for the token.