UNI Reclaims $4 as Uniswap Ships New v4 Hooks

UNI is trading around the $4 mark, up roughly 5% over 24 hours on volume more than 60% above the previous day. The move follows a dense stretch of Uniswap releases, including a permissioned pool standard for regulated assets and a new hook for market makers, plus votes widening fee collection. Whether any of it is driving the price is a separate question, and the evidence is thinner than the timing suggests.

UNI has recovered to $3.90 to $4.00 depending on the venue. Uniswap turned on protocol fees under the UNIfication vote of December 2025, burned 100 million UNI from the treasury, and is now voting to widen fee collection. The protocol reportedly generates over $5.2 million in daily fees. UNI remains roughly 91% below its 2021 peak.

Where the UNI Coin Is Trading

UNI trades near $3.90, up about 5.1% in 24 hours and 4.8% on the week, according to CoinGecko, with a market cap around $2.43 billion. CoinMarketCap showed $4.00.

The more telling figure is turnover. Volume reached roughly $258 million, up 61.5% on the previous day. UNI also outperformed a global market down about 2.3% over the week, pointing to something specific to Uniswap rather than a broad risk-on move.

Check our detailed UNI price analysis for a long term outlook.

How Uniswap’s Fee Machine Works

For most of its life UNI was a governance crypto token with no claim on revenue. That changed with UNIfication, passed in December 2025 by 125.3 million UNI to 742. It switched on protocol fees, cut front-end fees to zero, merged Uniswap Labs and the Foundation, and burned 100 million UNI from the treasury.

Fees accumulate in a contract called TokenJar and release only when an equivalent value of UNI is destroyed at a burn address named Firepit. Net sequencer revenue from Unichain, Uniswap’s Layer 2, feeds the same process. Hayden Adams confirmed in mid-July that fees were live and buybacks beginning. The DAO is voting to extend collection across eleven chains, including v4 pools and Robinhood Chain.

Uniswap’s Release of Permissioned Pools

On 23 July, Uniswap released Permissioned Pools, a v4 hook standard letting issuers of regulated crypto assets enforce compliance inside the pool rather than the website. The contract checks an issuer-controlled allowlist on every swap and before any liquidity position is minted. Launch partners are Superstate, Securitize and Dowgo, the last contributing an ERC-3643 integration and awaiting EU DLT Pilot Regime authorisation. Uniswap cites estimates the tokenised asset market could reach $11 trillion by 2030.

A day earlier, the DualPool hook went live, letting crypto market makers earn lending yield on idle inventory until a swap needs it. In June, Spark moved $150 million of stablecoin liquidity onto v4.

Read: What Is DeFi? Decentralized Finance Explained for Beginners

What Caused UNI’s Price Rise 

Many are reading the fee switch as the cause of UNI’s increase in price. The record argues otherwise. UNIfication passed in December 2025 and was called the most consequential vote in the protocol’s history, yet UNI fell to a cycle low weeks later as altcoins sold off. Nothing in the current data establishes causality. Permissioned Pools serve institutional issuers, not retail traders, and will take quarters to show volume. What can be said is that UNI is outperforming peers on rising turnover during a week of heavy protocol news.

What to Watch Next

The fee votes are the first checkpoint, since wider collection increases revenue available for buybacks. The trade-off is that liquidity providers keep less, which could push capital to rival exchanges.

Beyond that, watch the burn rate against fee revenue, whether any issuer deploys a live permissioned pool, and whether $4 becomes support rather than resistance. 

The Bottom Line

Uniswap spent 2026 turning UNI into an asset tied to protocol revenue, and July added institutional plumbing on top. Reclaiming $4 is not evidence that the market has repriced the coin on fundamentals. That case rests on burn volumes, not headlines