UNI Soars 70% on Governance Overhaul and Burn Proposal—DeFi’s Sleeping Giant Wakes Up
UNI token holders just got a masterclass in how to pump a governance token—slash supply, tweak voting rules, and watch the market lose its mind.
The Uniswap community's one-two punch of protocol upgrades and a deflationary burn mechanism sent UNI screaming past resistance levels this week. Turns out, decentralized finance loves a good old-fashioned supply shock.
Wall Street analysts are already calling it 'QE for degens'—because nothing solves crypto's liquidity problems like artificially creating scarcity. The 70% surge proves DeFi governance tokens aren't dead... they just needed better financial engineering than your average shitcoin.
Now the real question: Will the upgrades actually make UNI useful beyond speculative trading? The market's betting yes—for now.
Uniswap whale activity hits 4-year high
As per the data shared by Santiment, daily whale transactions have hit a 4-year high for UNI. This was coupled with the highest amount of new Uniswap wallets created in 3 years. It added that the retail FOMO is high at the moment.
Meanwhile, it also projected another wave of rallies after the euphoria dies down. That spike WOULD be based on the positive fundamental news and improved governance for the project.
🦄 Uniswap's price is +70% over the past week with the project's new fee proposal to burn 100M tokens as part of an initiative to redirect protocol revenues to token burns, and new feature launches to enhance liquidity provider rewards.
🐳 A 4-year high in daily whale… pic.twitter.com/XdfJvDmPQ9
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) November 11, 2025
On-chain data supports the hype. It has been reported that two wallets, likely controlled by a single whale, deposited 1.7 million UNI (worth $15 million) into Binance within hours of each other.
Separately, two wallets linked to Uniswap moved 8.2 million UNI (worth $77 million) to Coinbase Prime. These tokens were originally released to early investors five years ago.
UNI price has jumped by another 5% in the past 24 hours. It is trading at an average price of $8.54 at press time. Uniswap is still down by 81% from its all-time high of $44.97, recorded on May 3, 2021. Its 24-hour trading dumped by 46% to stand at $1.79 billion.
Uniswap eyes $650M volume with ‘UNIfication’
Uniswap Labs and the Uniswap Foundation unveiled their plan dubbed “UNIfication” last Monday. It seeks to activate long-discussed protocol fees on the platform with an aim to push it to $650 million in daily trading volume. The platform will use the proceeds for a perpetual token burn, too. If passed, the proposal would retroactively burn around 100 million UNI tokens from the treasury, pegged to fees generated since Uniswap’s inception.
An expert highlighted that Uniswap has generated over a billion dollars in annual fees since 2018, but none of that value has flowed to tokenholders. Hopefully, this proposal finally closes that loop.
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams sees the new plan as a reset moment for protocol governance. He stated that for the past five years, Labs has been unable to meaningfully participate in Uniswap governance, and “That ends today.”
Crypto attorney Jake Chervinsky, in a post, stated that the Uniswap proposal isn’t the end of the decentralized DAO model, but it’s the next generation. He highlighted that tokens like UNI can provide holders with real ownership of on-chain infrastructure and cash flows. This can go on without asking them to design and vote on every single change and improvement in the project.
He added that it’s not the same vision that many had five years ago, when DAO members were considered daily active managers of protocol development. He sees this as a progressive step as it’s a vision of a new type of capital asset.
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