1/ Uniswap governance is voting on its first proposal under the new UNIfication process — expanding protocol fees to 8 L2s and enabling fees on ALL remaining v3 pools via a new tier-based adapter.
Here’s what’s actually happening under the hood 🧵
2/ Quick refresher. After UNIfication passed in December, protocol fees went live on v2 and select v3 pools on Ethereum mainnet only.
This proposal expands that to: Arbitrum, Base, Celo, OP Mainnet, Soneium, X Layer, Worldchain, and Zora.
3/ How the burn mechanism works:
Fees accumulate in TokenJar in whatever tokens they were collected in. When the value crosses a threshold, searchers compete to call the release function on the Firepit contract — burn UNI, receive up to 20 tokens from TokenJar. The UNI goes to 0xdead. Gone forever.
Per the protocol-fees repo, the L2 threshold is 2,000 UNI. Mainnet threshold isn’t specified in the README but can be inferred from onchain activity.
4/ Has anyone actually called the release function yet?
Yes. Within 24 hours of fees going live.
4a/ On Dec 29 — one day after activation — a searcher called release() for the first time (nonce: 0).
They burned 4,000 UNI (~$24k) and received from TokenJar: → 16,054 USDT → 5.26 WETH → 4,203 USDC → 0.034 WBTC → 0.188 PAXG
Total received: ~15,000. UNI: permanently burned.
The first release burned 4,000 UNI, suggesting that’s the current mainnet threshold — though it’s adjustable by governance via the thresholdSetter role.
tx: 0x2dc3d8a165fe57ef89cd928f16a1de6d39725729cec85a25c5511906ed50fb08
5/ Now for the L2 expansion. The first phase was mainnet-only so no bridging was needed. This proposal introduces bridging for the first time using two contracts:
OptimismBridgedResourceFirepit → OP Stack chains ArbitrumBridgedResourceFirepit → Arbitrum chains
6/ Breaking it down:
OP Stack: OP Mainnet, Base, Soneium, Worldchain, Zora, Celo Arbitrum: Arbitrum, X Layer
6 OP Stack chains. 2 Arbitrum. Reflects the broader L2 landscape.
7/ Why these 8 chains specifically? The proposal doesn’t explain — but the answer may be hiding in the implementation.
The chain selection wasn’t primarily about TVL or volume. It was about which chains the bridging infrastructure was already built to support.
8/ Uniswap had already built and battle-tested this exact bridging infrastructure for Unichain sequencer fees. When it came time to expand to L2s, they could point the same plumbing at 8 more chains with minimal new engineering work.
The chains that got fees first were the ones where the bridge was already ready — not necessarily the highest volume ones.
9/ This also means chains like Polygon, BNB, Avalanche, and Rootstock get left out for now — not because of low activity, but because they’d require entirely new bridging contracts, new audits, and different security assumptions.
10/ Speaking of Rootstock — this proposal is actually the payoff of years of quiet DAO work. The Uniswap Accountability Committee ran a multi-year deployment program that put canonical Uniswap instances on chains that weren’t even on the official frontend.
Those deployments are now eligible for protocol fees.
11/ One chain worth flagging: Zora. Barely shows up on DeFiLlama’s Uniswap TVL rankings. So why include it?
Probably not about idle TVL — it’s about token launch volume. Every token that launches on Zora graduates to a Uniswap pool, generating swap fees at the moment of initial market creation. Activity-driven, not liquidity-driven.
12/ The big picture: OP Stack and Arbitrum became the de facto standard for Ethereum L2 infrastructure — and Uniswap’s fee architecture was built on top of that.
The protocol is now a multi-chain fee engine. Every new OP Stack or Arbitrum chain that gets a Uniswap deployment is a future candidate for the next expansion.
With the Unification proposal, protocols fees were turned on for v2 pools and and select v3 pools on Ethereum mainnet. This proposal will expand protocol fees on v2 and v3 to Arbitrum, Base, Celo, OP Mainnet, Soneium, X Layer, Worldchain, and Zora.
What’s cool to surface is that the DAO’s multi-year deployment program led by the Uniswap Accountability Committee was laying the groundwork for this kind of fee expansion as it deployed a canonical instance of uniswap on chains that were not in the uniswap front end.
Refresher on UNIfications: Fees are collected on v2 and v3 pools on Ethereum mainnet.
When tokenjar tokens’ value accumulates to 2k UNI or more then searchers compete and then the winner can call a release function on Firepit contract where they send 2k UNI and in exchange receive up to 20 tokens in tokenjar. The UNI is sent to a 0xdead address.
Enable protocol fees on all v3 pools via a new tier-based v3OpenFeeAdapter on mainnet and the above L2s
Process: UNI fees accumulate in tokenjar. Then winner can call release function on Firepit contract to send 2k UNI and receive up to 20 tokens in return.
Question: has tokenjar accumulated 2k UNI yet? Has anyone called the release function?
The first phase of this proposal was only on Ethereum mainnet so no bridging was utilized but now bridging will be utilized.
The burn function uses two functions: OptimismBridgedResourceFirepit and ArbitrumBridgedResourceFirepit that bridges tokens from mainnet to mainnet.
Optimism/OP Stack → OptimismBridgedResourceFirepit
- OP Mainnet
- Base
- Soneium
- Worldchain
- Zora
- Celo (migrated to OP Stack L2 last year)
Arbitrum → ArbitrumBridgedResourceFirepit
- Arbitrum
- X Layer (built on Arbitrum’s AnyTrust/Orbit stack)
So the selection wasn’t primarily about volume or TVL rankings — it was about which chains the bridging infrastructure was already built to support. They already had this infrastructure running for Unichain sequencer fees, and the 8 chains were essentially the ones they could plug into that same plumbing immediately.
This matters because Uniswap already had this exact infrastructure running for Unichain sequencer fees — the proposal even says so explicitly. So when it came time to expand protocol fees to L2s, they could just point the same plumbing at 8 more chains with minimal new engineering work.
So in short — OP Stack and Arbitrum became the de facto standard for Ethereum L2 infrastructure, and Uniswap’s fee architecture was built on top of that. The chains that got fees first weren’t necessarily the highest volume ones; they were the ones where the bridge was already battle-tested and ready to go.
Why was Zora chain chosen? Doesn’t have meaningful Uniswap TVL based on Defillama but it could have to do with transaction volume from token launches. Every new token minted and traded on Zora generates Uniswap swap fees at the moment of initial market creation. That could actually be a meaningful fee stream even if there’s minimal locked TVL, because it’s driven by activity rather than idle liquidity.
Q: What is the threshold for the burn in tokenjar for mainnet? is it 4k
- what is threshold for op chains: looks like 2k here https://github.com/uniswap/protocol-fees
- open question is mainnet