Uniswap seeks vote to extend UNI burn fees to v4 pools

Uniswap Labs has asked UNI holders to approve protocol fees on part of Uniswap v4 as the next step in the UNIfication burn program, which already operates across 11 chains. A snapshot vote opened July 7 and runs for five days until July 12, with a binding on-chain vote due the week of July 13. Under the system, some trading fees go to the protocol, and claiming those fees requires a searcher to burn an equal value of UNI before the tokens are bridged to Ethereum and sent to the 0xdead address, permanently removing them from circulation. The proposal would cover v4 pools without hooks, pools created through auctions, and pools using aggregator hooks (pools that bring in outside money). Fees for aggregator hooks would be set 25 times higher, allowing charges above the usual 10 basis point ceiling; the rate would be 3 basis points on Base and 10 basis points on other networks. The change has drawn criticism from Guillaume Lambert, who runs an options protocol called Panoptic, who said taxing v4 could drive liquidity providers away and put UNI holders ahead of the participants supplying pool capital. Uniswap argues v4 needs a more complex setup than earlier versions because hooks (custom pool extensions) can change fees block by block, so the proposal uses two contracts: V4FeePolicy to determine fees under governance-set rules and V4FeeAdapter to enforce them, adjust specific pools if needed, and send proceeds to the TokenJar contract. Uniswap burned a record 186,000 UNI in one day last month, above the 134,000 daily high Cryptopolitan reported on June 5. UNI traded at $3.23 on July 7 with a market cap of about $2 billion, versus its May 2021 peak of $44.97. The company is still expanding, having launched on Robinhood Chain, a new layer 2 network, around July 1, where v2, v3, v4 and UniswapX went live from day one and generated more than $250 million in volume in less than a week.