First published 18 September 2020, the week the token existed. Expanded in October 2026 for the fee switch that burns UNI, which is a different object from the airdrop people still get phished with. Uniswap is a set of contracts that let people trade one token for another against a pool, without an order book and without a company in the middle of that trade. UNI is the governance token of those contracts. It is not ether. It is not the token you came to swap. A liquidity receipt, the piece of a pool you get for depositing, is a third thing again.
Ethereum without the jargon is the machine the contracts sit on. DeFi is software with rules you cannot call support about is what a pool does when the price moves. This page is UNI.
The protocol, then the token
Hayden Adams deployed the first Uniswap contracts on Ethereum in November 2018. A pool holds two tokens. A trade pays one in and takes the other out, and the price the pool offers moves as the ratio moves. That is the product. Later versions added concentrated liquidity, so a depositor can choose a price range, and hooks, so a pool can run extra code. Those are different contracts. A pool on another chain that uses the Uniswap name is a deployment on that chain, not your Ethereum balance.
UNI arrived in September 2020. One billion were minted. Fifteen percent could be claimed by people who had used the contracts or provided liquidity, from a snapshot on 1 September 2020. The well-known slice was 400 UNI for an address that had called the contracts. The rest went to a treasury, the team, investors, advisers, and a short liquidity-mining program, on vesting that ran about four years and finished in 2025. That claim window is closed. A site that still says “claim your UNI” wants a signature or a phrase. A wallet signature is not a handshake.
What holding UNI does
UNI votes. Governance can change a fee parameter, spend the treasury, and, on the docs’ own terms, mint more UNI up to 2 percent of supply a year. The project says that mint has not been used. A vote is not a dividend. For years the protocol fee, a cut of trades that would go to the protocol rather than to liquidity providers, sat off.
In December 2025 governance turned protocol fees on for Uniswap v2 and v3. The fees are collected and used to burn UNI. Holders do not receive a share of the fees in their wallets. A burn reduces a number. It is not a payment. Whether the same switch is on for a newer version, or on a chain you are actually using, is a governance fact that can move. Read the current fee schedule. Do not read a 2020 blog post that says holders might someday be paid.
The governance process also sits inside a legal wrapper called DUNI, a Wyoming entity meant to give the voters a defined organisation. Holding a token is not, by itself, membership in that entity. The docs say membership takes holding UNI and taking part, such as delegating a vote. This page is not legal advice about what that entity owes you.
UNI on Ethereum is an ERC-20. A UNI on another network is a different entry until you have checked the contract. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, provide liquidity, or vote.
