By Devin Walsh 9.30.2025
Since the passage of the Uniswap Unleashed proposal, the UF has advanced legal recognition for Uniswap Governance, supported the growth of v4 to $180B in cumulative volume, and onboarded more than 700 new DeFi builders.
In February, we laid out an ambitious vision for the year ahead: to scale network supply, grow network demand, and equip Governance with new tools for growth. Over the past months, we’ve made measurable progress across these priorities:
In September, Uniswap Governance passed the DUNI proposal with 53M votes in favor (and 0 against), becoming the largest DAO to adopt the Decentralized Unincorporated Nonprofit Association (DUNA) framework. This landmark vote provides Governance with legal recognition, providing a clear pathway towards Protocol fee activation.
Today, Unichain has passed $62B in DEX volume, establishing itself as DeFi’s purpose-built, developer-first L2. Meanwhile, Uniswap v4 has crossed $190B in cumulative volume, with 5K v4 hooks initialized.
Over the past months, UF programs have onboarded 700+ developers, subsidized audits for 20+ teams, and contributed to the launch of 5 new protocols. Hook Design Lab projects are already demonstrating strong traction, with EulerSwap surpassing $3.7B in volume and Aegis approaching $1B. Critically, these programs have surfaced key learnings for builder success, laying the groundwork for deeper ecosystem support.
From novel DeFi protocols to new funding mechanisms, the UF is working hand-in-hand with builders, infrastructure providers, researchers, and Governance to drive long-term protocol growth. This update captures the impact of that work, and offers a look into the future we’re building together.
Melio LLC
360 support for v4 teams: Technical mentorship, GTM, incentives, routing, and integration
Enabling regulated financial institutions to deploy compliant liquidity pools on Uniswap v4
Development and adoption of the Institutional Liquidity Hook
Unichain lending incentives campaign
Morpho
Full Unichain frontend support within the main Morpho UI
In September, Morpho reached $140M TVL on Unichain
Propeller Heads
Integration of v4 hooks into Tycho’s indexing system to enable accurate simulation and reliable execution
Gaunlet
$1.2B chain-wide TVL in 26 days; ATH TVL $1.45B
$62B+ in Unichain cumulative volume (YTD)
Key infrastructure partnerships for Unichain
Multiple Grantees
Onboarding and support for over 180+ integrations
*Indicates a continuing grant from 2024.
**$9.9 million of the $12 million committed to Unichain Integration Partners was for grants in 2026 through 2029, demonstrating our long term commitment to the protocol. Select multi-year commitments reflected in the committed grants amount include provisions that allow for reimbursements by Unichain Partners to the Foundation of up to 100% of the committed amount upon achievement of certain growth metrics.
Global hackathon representation and rewards
ETHGlobal Winners:
Watchtower
Calary
Hook up to AMM
JIT saving vault
OpSwap on Unichain
stETHer
Eigen Games Winners:
Restaking Hook (Emily, Simran)
Uniliquid Hook (Ruslan, Viktor)
UniGuard (Oliver, Jackson)
EigenBets (Pravesh, Cole)
SwapBook (Pietro & Joy)
Security audits for the Community Router ( v4 Optimized Router)
3rd party audit costs for the v4-optimized router
Multiple grantees
Infinite Hackathon winners:
Aegis
Cork
EigenBets
LIKWID.FI
Veraswap
Vista Markets
0xDefAI
Unipump
Prediction market hook
Unimon
Retro Grant winners:
Alma Labs
SuperUI
Gamma Strategies
GhostGraph
Tinyassunicorns
IdeaSoft
A directory of hooks with real-time insights and metrics
Atrium Academy*
Growing to 4 new cohorts, onboarding 300+ developers in UHI4 and UHI5.
Program expanding to include self-paced course, onboarding 400+ builders: self-paced course
Launch of Hook Product Accelerator, supporting 11 founder teams
To date, UHI has had over 2.5K applicants and 411 graduates, with participants contributing to 341+ hooks
OpenZeppelin
Base implementations for custom accounting, asynchronous swaps, and custom curves
Ready-to-use hooks for general use cases, like sandwich protection
*Indicates a continuing grant from 2024.
Custom smart contract development to expand testing suite for proposals
Scopelift
Protocol fee infrastructure: protocol fee contracts and hook protocol fee splitter contracts
Innovation pipeline: governance contract prototyping
Legal foundations onchain: development and deployment of the DUNA agreement contract, giving governance the ability to execute legal agreements onchain
Butter
First implementation of futarchy for grant funding in the Uniswap ecosystem, in which a grant to Morpho was allocated to boost Unichain TVL
$70K in forecaster trading
$207M +30-day trailing average TVL from the winning protocol, Morpho
Developing & maintaining the Uniswap Governance platform
Agora
Empowering participation: vote tracking, proposal notification system, gas relay, and delegate accountability tools
Strengthening security: Proposal Transaction Simulation for greater governance security
Legal foundations onchain: DUNI specific advisory and tooling
*Indicates a continuing grant from 2024.
A forum for researchers to discuss critical topics in DeFi and develop new research.
Edge City
Participation from 35+ leading researchers, resulting in paper concepts on LP profitability, trading LP risk, making v4 adaptive, and decentralized oracles
CBER Forum
Novel research on incentives and reputation liquid staking
An analytics portal for researchers to access core DEX data schemas with open, standardized methodologies
Allium Labs
Development started on new orderflow market structure
DEX Analytics portal now used by leading researchers, including TLDR Fellows and CBER Summer School PhD students
Whetstone Research
Powers Zora, an onchain social network, with +2MM hooked pools initialized
TLDR
2025 Conference
Sold out: 200+ attendees
27 novel research talks
2025 Fellowship
15 fellows
15 new research papers
2 practical implementations
*Indicates a continuing grant from 2024.
Review of governance contracts and infrastructure
Governance contract reviews and upgrades
Gas Subsidy Program audit
Aggregator audit
Comprehensive security review and public dashboard to monitor potential attack vectors and metrics
Blockful
Applied the anticapture framework for Uniswap governance
Built best practices for evaluating DAO safety across the industry
Provides access to best-in-class security audits at reduced or no cost, streamlining the process through a vetted pool of providers with transparent pricing and quality standards
Areta
Developed a new interface for the UFSF open marketplace
Subsidized audits for an additional 10 teams, totaling 22 audits
Onboarded 9 security providers, totaling 25 providers
Activated monthly cohorts
*Indicates a continuing grant from 2024.
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