Uniswap Price Tracker (UNI) & Whale Tracker

What is Uniswap

Uniswap is the largest decentralised exchange in crypto. It is a set of smart contracts on Ethereum and other chains that let anyone swap one token for another directly from a wallet, with no account, no order book and no company holding the funds. Hayden Adams, a mechanical engineer who taught himself Solidity after being laid off, launched the first version in November 2018 with a grant from the Ethereum Foundation.

UNI is the protocol's governance token. It was created in September 2020 and airdropped to every address that had ever used Uniswap, 400 UNI each, worth over a thousand dollars at the time and far more at the 2021 peak. UNI holders vote on how the protocol develops and how its treasury and fees are used. The live market figures at the top of this page refresh automatically.

Uniswap Labs, the company that builds the interface and wallet, and the Uniswap Foundation, which funds grants and governance, are separate from the protocol itself, which runs on-chain and cannot be switched off.

How Uniswap works

Uniswap introduced the automated market maker to mainstream use. Instead of matching buyers and sellers, each trading pair is a pool of two tokens supplied by liquidity providers. Prices are set by a formula, originally x times y equals a constant, so a trade that removes one token from the pool pushes its price up along a curve. Liquidity providers earn a share of every swap fee in exchange for taking on the risk that the ratio of their deposited tokens changes.

Version 2 in May 2020 allowed any token pair and added price oracles. Version 3 in May 2021 introduced concentrated liquidity, letting providers choose the price range where their capital works, which made the exchange far more efficient for stablecoin and blue-chip pairs. Version 4 launched in January 2025 with hooks, small programs that run at points in a swap's life cycle, so developers can build custom fee logic, limit orders and dynamic pricing on top of the core contracts.

Uniswap is deployed on Ethereum mainnet and on Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain and others. In February 2025 Uniswap Labs launched Unichain, its own Ethereum layer-2 network, to give the protocol a home with cheaper fees and faster blocks.

Supply and tokenomics

UNI launched with a supply of one billion tokens, vesting over four years: 60 percent to the community through the airdrop, liquidity mining and the treasury, 21 percent to the team, 18 percent to investors and a small share to advisers. After the four-year vesting ended in 2024 the protocol allows two percent annual inflation, decided by governance.

For years the swap fees went entirely to liquidity providers and UNI holders received nothing, a point of long debate. In late 2025 governance approved a plan to switch on protocol fees, send them to buy and burn UNI, and bring Uniswap Labs and the Foundation under one structure. The vote changed UNI from a pure governance token into one with a claim on exchange revenue. Fee switch details, treasury size and burn totals are set by subsequent votes, so check the latest governance forum posts for current parameters.

History and milestones

Uniswap's volume exploded during the DeFi summer of 2020, when it briefly out-traded Coinbase. A fork called SushiSwap tried to drain its liquidity with token incentives, which prompted the UNI launch and airdrop. By 2021 Uniswap had processed hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative volume, and by 2025 that figure passed three trillion.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission sent Uniswap Labs a Wells notice in April 2024, signalling possible enforcement, then closed the investigation in February 2025 without action. The interface has geofenced certain tokens and countries in response to regulatory pressure, but the underlying contracts remain accessible to anyone. Uniswap also launched its own mobile wallet, a browser extension and an aggregator called UniswapX that routes orders across venues for better prices.

Where to buy and trade UNI

UNI is listed on Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bybit and most other exchanges against the dollar and major stablecoins. It is, naturally, also traded on Uniswap itself against ETH and USDC on several chains. Exchange-traded products tracking UNI exist in Europe.

To use the protocol rather than just hold the token, connect a wallet such as MetaMask, Rabby or the Uniswap mobile app to app.uniswap.org, pick a chain, and swap. Fees are lowest on Base, Arbitrum and Unichain. Providing liquidity earns fees but exposes you to impermanent loss, so read up before depositing into a pool.

What people use Uniswap for

Spot trading is the main use. Uniswap is where most new Ethereum tokens get their first market, because listing requires nothing more than creating a pool. Traders use it for everything from stablecoin swaps to long-tail tokens that no centralised exchange will list. Wallets such as MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet and Rabby route their built-in swap features through Uniswap pools, so many people use the protocol without ever visiting its website.

The second use is earning. Liquidity providers deposit pairs of tokens and collect a share of fees; on busy pairs the returns compete with lending yields, on quiet pairs they do not cover impermanent loss. Uniswap's price feeds also serve as oracles for other protocols, and its v4 hooks are becoming a base layer that other DeFi products build on rather than a product on its own.

Risks to understand

The Uniswap contracts have never been hacked, but the ecosystem around them has: fake tokens with real names, phishing sites that copy the interface, and malicious approvals that drain wallets. Anyone can list any token, so a pool existing is not a sign the token is legitimate. Always check the contract address.

UNI's value now depends partly on governance decisions about fees and burns, which can change with a vote. Competition from Curve, PancakeSwap, aggregators and Solana-based exchanges is constant. Regulatory treatment of decentralised exchanges remains unsettled in many countries. This guide is a reference, not investment advice.

Uniswap FAQ