Uniswap Floats Turning On Protocol Fees for v4 Pools

Uniswap Labs on July 7 proposed activating protocol fees on a subset of Uniswap v4 pools, extending the fee rollout that DAO voters approved under the UNIfication package to the exchange's newest and most flexible pool architecture.

The temperature check went to a five-day Snapshot vote running July 7-12, with an onchain vote scheduled to begin the week of July 13. Because Uniswap's GovernorBravo contract caps proposals at 10 actions, Uniswap Labs said two onchain votes will be posted in parallel to cover all the chains involved.

UNI is up 6.8% to $3.57 in the past 24 hrs, giving Uniswap a market capitalization of $2.2 billion, according to CoinGecko, while ETH is up almost 3%. The token remains down more than 90% from its May 2021 record of about $44.92, though it had climbed more than 40% over the past month amid the UNIfication burns and Uniswap's expansion onto new venues.

UNIfication Rollout

The proposal follows the UNIfication overhaul, which DAO members passed in December with near-unanimous support and which turned on protocol fees and directed them toward burning UNI. It builds on four earlier fee proposals, numbered #93 through #96, and uses the same expedited governance track those proposals established.

Protocol fees are now live across all v2 and v3 pools on 11 chains: Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Celo, OP Mainnet, Soneium, X Layer, Worldchain, Zora, BNB Chain and Polygon. Uniswap Labs said the protocol set a record last month, citing the UNIBurnBot account's report that 186,000 UNI were burned in a single day.

A New Fee System for v4

v4's design forced a different approach. Where v2 pools carry a single static fee tier and v3 pools carry several, v4's hooks allow potentially unlimited fee tiers, and a pool's fee can change from one block to the next. Setting a fee on each pool individually is not workable at that scale.

To handle it, the proposal introduces a V4 Fee Controller split across two contracts. A V4FeePolicy contract computes the fee for any pool from rules that governance defines, and can be swapped out if the logic needs to change. A V4FeeAdapter contract enforces any per-pool overrides governance has set, otherwise applies the policy's fee, pushes it to the pool and routes the proceeds to a TokenJar contract on each chain. The policy sorts each pool into a "family" based on its characteristics, then resolves the fee from the most specific applicable rule down to a global default. The contracts are published in Uniswap's protocol-fees repository.

The temp check would switch on fees for three families: static fee pools without hooks, pools launched through Continuous Clearing Auctions, and aggregator hook pools that route external liquidity into v4. Static and CCA pools follow a curve pegged to a proportion of each pool's LP fee. Aggregator hooks carry a flat fee with a 25x multiplier that lifts the cap to 250 basis points, set at a 10 bps family default and 3 bps for select stable pairs on most chains, and 3 bps and 1 bps respectively on Base. Uniswap Labs stressed the proposal does not enable fees on any v4 pools outside those families. As with v2 and v3, collected fees fund UNI burns, with tokens accumulated on L2s and alternative L1s bridged back to Ethereum and sent to the 0xdead address.

LP Pushback

The proposal drew immediate opposition from Guillaume Lambert, founder of the options protocol Panoptic, who disclosed he had voted "Abstain" on UNIfication and argued the fee switch should never touch v4.

"Turning on the v4 fee switch risks killing the protocol," Lambert wrote, contending that liquidity providers are "structurally short convexity" and, by his analysis, already earn less than the volatility they take on. Taxing v4 pools without compensating LPs, he said, would leave them "nowhere to go except to other AMMs/UniV3-forks." He said he could only support the move if LPs were directly compensated with sustained UNI incentives running "practically forever until organic activity returns."

Not all early feedback was critical. Forum participant Abel189 backed the proposal, calling a deterministic, on-chain fee policy "a more scalable approach than configuring individual pools one by one" and praising the gradual rollout across specific families.