Author: Gu Yu, ChainCatcher

In the cryptocurrency industry, the speed of innovation is often an important criterion for measuring the vitality of a protocol. However, Uniswap, which once single-handedly kicked off the DeFi Summer, seems to be slowing down.

Looking back at the evolution of Uniswap, its iterative pace has always been known for its speed: the V1 featuring the AMM mechanism was born in 2018, V2 introduced ERC-20/ERC-20 pairs in 2020, V3 launched concentrated liquidity in 2021, and V4 proposed programmable Hooks in 2023. On average, Uniswap releases an innovative mechanism every 1.5 years, reshaping the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars.

However, time is frozen at April 2026, nearly three years have passed since the announcement of the V4 proposal, yet the market still awaits any updates on the next version of Uniswap.

Currently, Uniswap product dynamics still revolve around Uniswap V4, which could transform Uniswap from a fixed-function AMM into a highly programmable liquidity platform. The core innovation of this version is Hooks, which are modular, programmable plugins allowing developers to insert custom logic throughout the lifecycle of the pool, such as implementing dynamic fees, limit orders, TWAMM (time-weighted average market making), MEV protection, loss hedging, custom oracles, continuous clearing auctions (CCA), and almost limitless functionalities.

In other words, many developers previously needed to fork Uniswap to achieve specific functions, which led to liquidity being diverted from Uniswap to many forked DEXs; now, developers only need to write a Hook contract to significantly enhance the customization of Uniswap's liquidity pools.

Although in June 2023, Uniswap announced the specific concept of the V4 version, for safety reasons, this version underwent 9 independent audits and a massive security competition, causing its mainnet launch to be delayed from the initial Q3 2024 to late January 2025.

After launch, Uniswap V4’s total locked amount peaked at over $1.2 billion, currently retreating to $650 million, but still only 40% of the V3 version, and also lagging behind the V2 version.

At the same time, Uniswap is also "methodically" accelerating its expansion in usage scenarios and markets. In the past six months, Uniswap has successively launched on blockchains like Linea, Tempo, X Layer, and Monad to seize market opportunities on emerging blockchains, while also fully expanding its API partnerships, with recent adopters including Anchorage Digital, Ledger, Privy, and MetaMask.

Of course, Uniswap has not been without new moves on the product front in recent years, for example, the application chain Uniswap and CCA token auction products have made significant waves in the market.

In February 2025, Uniswap's launched application chain Unichain officially went live on the mainnet, attracting over 90 DeFi protocols for integration; its TVL dropped from a peak of $900 million to now $36 million.

By the end of 2025, Uniswap announced the launch of the continuous clearing auction feature (CCA), specifically for price discovery and liquidity kickoff for new assets, and subsequently partnered with Aztec and Rainbow for token sales.

However, it must be pointed out that by 2025, both application chains and token auctions are very "old-fashioned" business models in the crypto field; many projects whose main business is facing bottlenecks have been exploring businesses like "chain issuing" and launchpads. Uniswap has also begun to "follow suit" and join this trend, but its actual impact is very limited.

In earlier years, Uniswap also made heavy acquisitions of products like Genie and Crypto: The Game, exploring the NFT trading market and on-chain gaming, but the subsequent data reflects that these were two failed acquisitions.

In the past year, Uniswap’s growth officer Sarina Siddhanti, chief operating officer Mary Catherine Lader, strategic and operations officer Zach Wong, chief legal officer Katherine Minarik, and venture capital head Julia Rosenberg have all left the company, which is also a reflection of Uniswap's efforts to control operating costs and its sluggish growth.

Uniswap’s overall decline is also reflected in the price of its governance token UNI. Over the past year, the price of UNI has fallen by more than 74%, dropping below $2 at its lowest, significantly higher than the overall decline of mainstream coins, which has led to market analysts' complaints about the "lack of actual value" of the UNI token.

In September 2025, Arca's chief investment officer Jeff Dorman responded to a tweet from Uniswap founder Hayden Adams about the protocol's data performance by saying: "We are not bearish on Uniswap, but we are bearish on UNI. In today's market and the ever-changing regulatory environment, it is just a completely meaningless token. Your position and that of your venture capitalists do not matter; either switch to a revenue distribution or buyback model, or simply stop using the token."

To respond to market doubts and give more value to UNI, the Uniswap Foundation initiated a proposal last November to open the protocol fee switch for Uniswap V2 and V3 versions and use it for buyback and destruction of UNI, while also destroying 100 million UNI from the treasury. Subsequently, UNI surged nearly 38% in a short time, reaching a high of over $9.

According to DeFillama data, Uniswap's recent daily fee income is between $100,000 and $200,000, and its income over the last 30 days was $3.93 million, with an annualized income of about $46 million, still lagging behind other DeFi protocols like PancakeSwap, Jupiter, Lido, and Aave.

Uniswap's awkward position is actually a projection and reflection of the dismal state of the DeFi industry: a lack of underlying innovation, exhausted industry narratives, and liquidity repeatedly consumed in fragmentation and stock warfare.

Nonetheless, Uniswap remains one of the few leading DeFi protocols that have not been hacked, with no incidents of funds being stolen at the protocol level, and it is still the decentralized trading protocol with the highest total locked amount, maintaining its industry status and user trust.

The question remains: will there be a Uniswap V5? If so, when will it arrive? Can Uniswap continue to be the engine for the next wave of DeFi Summer?

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