Uniswap’s UNI Jumps 60% on Proposal to Reward Token Holders in Major Governance Overhaul

Decentralized exchange Uniswap’s governance token (UNI) jumped Friday as much as 60% after a proposal to overhaul the protocol’s governance system, submitted by Uniswap Foundation’s governance lead, Erin Koen.

The proposal aims to “strengthen and invigorate” Uniswap’s governance, and also would reward UNI token holders who staked and delegated their tokens.

“I believe we should upgrade the protocol so that its fee mechanism rewards UNI token holders that have staked and delegated their tokens,” Erin Koen wrote in an X post.

Read more: What Is Uniswap? A Complete Beginner’s Guide

Koen’s proposal is a significant development for the largest decentralized exchange by trading volume, marking a departure from last year’s initiative to reward token holders with accrued fees. Last June, the Uniswap community turned down a proposal that would have switched on fees for many of the exchange’s liquidity pools and distributed a part of the revenue among token holders. In an October move, the exchange started to charge a 0.15% fee on crypto swaps involving ETH, USDC and other tokens initiated on the protocol’s interface.

Should Friday’s overhaul proposal approved in a community vote, it would enable the permissionless and programmatic collection of protocol fees, and distribute them pro-rata to UNI token holders who have staked and delegated their votes.

UNI was recently changing hands at $12, up nearly 60% over the past 24 hours and reaching its highest price since April 2022. It vastly outperformed the mostly flat price action of bitcoin (BTC) and the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20).

UPDATE (Feb. 23, 15:31 UTC): Updates price action. Adds context and details about governance proposal.