UNI's new proposal brings ecology back to common sense

Recently, the long-debated fee switch proposal in the UNI ecosystem has finally come to a conclusion. UNI has decided to link the token and ecosystem profits: it will allocate one-sixth of the transaction fees to buy back tokens.

In addition, the project team has burned nearly 10% of the total tokens as compensation for the previous lack of burning operations.

Before this news was released, on November 8, the price of UNI was approximately $5. After the announcement, as of the time of writing, the price of UNI is $9.22.

The significant increase in the token price is believed to be due to the community's excitement over finally finding strong support for the intrinsic value of the token, which has been reflected in the token price.

I am also pleased with this step taken by UNI.

I believe the more important significance of this news is that crypto projects, typified by Uniswap, are beginning to return to common sense. They are no longer allowing tokens to merely be empty assets with so-called "governance value," but are gradually pulling the value of tokens back to common judgment standards: what is the relationship between this token and the project, and what is its value?

Mr. Buffett once mentioned in his remarks about how companies should return value to shareholders:

If a company has a good plan to utilize its free cash flow to maintain and build a stronger moat, then it should make good use of that cash flow; otherwise, it should return the cash flow to shareholders:

• Either through cash dividends to shareholders

• Or by using free cash flow to buy back shares

If a company neither makes good use of its cash flow nor returns it to shareholders, it is not a good company.

Whether it is a good company listed in the U.S. stock market or a good company listed in the A-share market, they generally adhere to the above practices.

This standard should actually be the criterion for judging the quality of any company.

Unfortunately, in the crypto ecosystem, apart from a few companies (like some CEX), the vast majority of companies/teams neither utilize their cash flow to strengthen their moats nor return income to token holders or use it to buy back tokens.

This has led to a large number of tokens essentially being just a bunch of "air" assets with no intrinsic value.

Uniswap's step will have significant implications for improving the overall atmosphere of the crypto ecosystem.

However, since Uniswap has taken this step, we should rigorously apply the above standards to assess the value of the UNI token.

Among the publicly available data from Uniswap, two figures are quite interesting:

First, the project recorded nearly $230 million in transaction fees over the past 30 days, which translates to an annual fee of $2.76 billion.

Second, the project recorded a total of $1.504 billion in transaction fees from November 2024 to October 2025 (a full year).

Based on this data, we can estimate its PE and "dividend yield."

If we consider its transaction fee income as its net profit, then its annual net profit is approximately (lower limit) $1.504 billion to (upper limit) $2.76 billion.

Using the price of $5 before the surge and a total circulation of 6.29 billion tokens, its PE is 11 ~ 21.

If we use the price of $9.22 after the surge and the same total circulation of 6.29 billion tokens, its PE is 21 ~ 39.

Since the proposal stipulates that one-sixth of the transaction fees will be used for token buybacks, we can calculate its dividend yield based on this fee.

The dividends available for distribution are approximately (lower limit) $251 million to (upper limit) $460 million.

Using the price of $5 before the surge and a total circulation of 6.29 billion tokens, its dividend yield is approximately 0.7% ~ 1.5%.

If we use the price of $9.22 after the surge and the same total circulation of 6.29 billion tokens, its dividend yield is 0.4% ~ 0.8%.

I compared this data with Apple:

UNI's current fully diluted market cap is $9.2 billion, while Apple's fully diluted market cap is $39.8 trillion.

UNI's current maximum PE is 39, while Apple's current PE is 36.25.

UNI's maximum dividend yield is 1.5%, while Apple's is 0.39%.

Overall, Apple's market cap is over 430 times that of UNI. Generally speaking, the higher the market cap, the harder it is to improve profitability metrics, or in other words, the less "attractive" the profitability metrics appear. Given Apple's extremely high market cap, UNI's various metrics do not show particularly "good" or "attractive" characteristics compared to Apple.

Does this indicate that UNI's current profitability still has considerable room for improvement?

On the other hand, although these metrics appear relatively average, they are much less inflated compared to when the "market dream ratio" was high.

Does this also suggest from another perspective that while the market may be irrational and frenzied in the short term, it will eventually return to the fundamentals of the project in the long term, gradually reflecting the project's true intrinsic value?