Lately I have come to feel more and more that, if this bull market really keeps heading toward onchain finance, one of the biggest beneficiaries in the end may not be some public chain or some meme, but rather Uniswap.
The reason is actually quite simple.
It doesn't matter who issues the assets. In the end, all of them need somewhere to trade.
Robinhood Chain has already run this logic through once.
And when Circle's Arc mainnet launches on September 16, it will run through it all over again.
If in the future more and more stocks, stablecoins, RWAs, memes, even traditional financial assets all move onchain, then what Uniswap really wants to do may have long ceased to be "just a DEX".
What it wants to be is:
The liquidity layer for onchain assets.
01 | Robinhood Chain Has Already Set the Template for Uniswap
Robinhood Chain officially opened its public mainnet on July 1 this year.
Robinhood's positioning for it from the start was actually quite clear: tokenized stocks, RWAs, 24/7 onchain trading.
And on day one of the mainnet, Uniswap was already on it.
Not as an ordinary partner, either.
Robinhood officially defined Uniswap as:
Primary Public AMM.
That is, the primary public liquidity protocol of Robinhood Chain. Uniswap's V2, V3, V4, UniswapX, Web App, Wallet and API were all integrated from day one. (Robinhood)
What happened two months later may be something even Robinhood itself didn't fully anticipate.
What exploded first on Robinhood Chain was not stocks.
It was memes.
Especially after Pons came out, the trading volume of the whole chain was suddenly pulled up.
In early September, Robinhood Chain's weekly DEX trading volume briefly reached $12.4 billion, more than doubling straight from the previous week; on September 4, single-day onchain fees set a record of about $6 million. (The Block)
Pons itself was even more extreme.
On September 2, Pons issued close to 25,000 tokens in a single day, 24-hour trading volume hit $544 million, and roughly $5.95 million in fees was generated that day. (CoinDesk)
But here is a point that is very easy to overlook:
Pons got hot, and Uniswap quietly captured a big share of that behind the scenes.
Because after a Pons V2 token graduates from the bonding curve, it automatically enters Uniswap V4 and creates a permanently locked liquidity pool.
In other words:
Pons keeps producing new assets.
Uniswap takes over the long-term trading of those assets after they graduate.
This is also why, when I studied Pons V2 before, the more I studied, the more I felt that Uniswap was the infrastructure hidden behind it. Pons can mint tens of thousands of tokens in a day, but for those tokens to ultimately form a durable market, they still need Uniswap. (pons)
02 | How Much of Robinhood Chain's Trading Runs Through Uniswap?
This is where the data gets really extreme.
A recent set of Robinhood Chain data shows 24-hour DEX trading volume of roughly $1.88 billion.
Of which:
Uniswap V3: about $879 million
Uniswap V4: about $601 million
Uniswap V2: about $51 million
The three versions together add up to about:
$1.53 billion.
That is, under the methodology of this dataset, Uniswap accounts for roughly 81% of Robinhood Chain's DEX trading volume. (The Pond Street Ledger)
At peak times it was even more extreme.
Some statistics show that on Robinhood Chain's most active trading days, Uniswap at one point handled close to 98% of the chain's DEX trading volume. (ETHNews)
What's even more interesting is looking at it in reverse.
It is not only Robinhood Chain that needs Uniswap.
Uniswap V4 now increasingly needs Robinhood Chain, too.
Data from early September showed that Robinhood Chain at one point contributed about 56.3% of Uniswap V4's trading volume across the entire network. (crypto.news)
So this is no longer simply:
Uniswap deployed to Robinhood Chain.
It is:
Robinhood Chain has become one of Uniswap's most important new sources of growth.
That distinction is huge.
03 | After Pons Took Off, Uniswap Moved Fast
There is one more thing here, and it is also a point I really appreciate about the Uniswap team: facing a competitor that suddenly came out of nowhere, it reacts extremely fast.
Once Pons truly exploded, Uniswap Labs did not choose to go head-to-head with it to the bitter end.
It simply went out and bought PONS.
On September 3, Pons officially announced:
Uniswap Labs has purchased $PONS for long-term alignment.
That is, Uniswap Labs had purchased PONS for the long-term alignment of interests between the two sides.
How much was bought, at what price, and bought from where - neither side has disclosed this so far, so we cannot guess wildly about it. (The Defiant)
But the action itself is already very interesting.
Because Uniswap itself has actually built a launchpad too.
On August 5, Uniswap Labs launched Pools.trade, competing head-on with Pons on Robinhood Chain.
Right after it went live, Pools.trade's token issuance count even briefly exceeded Pons.
Then, in less than a month, Pons broke out.
By the end of August, Pons V2's daily fees had reached about $4.89 million, while Pools.trade managed only around $38,600. (The Defiant)
Then Uniswap did something very clever:
Since you won, I'll just buy you.
This reminds me of Pump.fun and Raydium back in the day.
In the early days, after Pump.fun tokens graduated, large amounts of liquidity flowed into Raydium.
The hotter Pump.fun got, the more money Raydium made.
But later Pump.fun built PumpSwap.
Graduated tokens no longer needed to migrate to Raydium; they could go straight into PumpSwap.
Which effectively took back into its own hands the liquidity and trading volume that used to be handed to Raydium. (Gimg)
So from Uniswap's perspective, it is easy to understand why it wanted long-term interest alignment with Pons.
Today Pons V2 works as:
Bonding Curve → graduation → Uniswap V4
Uniswap naturally wants this path to exist forever.
If one day Pons, having grown big enough, says:
Why would I keep handing all my graduated tokens to Uniswap? Can't I just build my own DEX?
Then the Pump.fun and Raydium story might play out once more.
So I don't think Uniswap buying PONS should be simplistically understood as:
"Uniswap is bullish on PONS, so it bought the token."
It looks more like:
Pons has become a very important asset issuance entry point on Robinhood Chain, and Uniswap wants to bind this entry point to its own liquidity layer for the long term.
Of course, that this is meant to stop Pons from copying the Pump.fun/PumpSwap playbook is, for now, only my speculation; neither side has said so.
But from a business-logic standpoint, the possibility is worth watching.
04 | After Robinhood, the Next One Is Arc
If it were only Robinhood Chain, I might still not feel this matters quite so much.
But on September 16, another heavyweight mainnet arrives:
Circle's Arc.
Arc and Robinhood Chain actually have one thing in common.
Neither is a chain built for crypto-native users in the traditional sense.
Robinhood Chain wants to move stocks, ETFs, and RWAs onchain.
Arc wants to move: stablecoins, payments, institutional capital, RWAs, forex, and tokenized assets onchain.
Circle has confirmed that the Arc public mainnet will officially launch on September 16. More than 100 institutions and ecosystem projects are already involved in building it, including traditional financial institutions such as BlackRock, DTCC, and Standard Chartered. (Circle)
And in Arc's liquidity infrastructure, the same name appears again:
Uniswap.
Arc even wrote a dedicated article explaining why it needs Uniswap.
There is one line in it that I find very key:
Lending protocols, derivatives, and LP strategies all require a deep, trustworthy swap venue before they can operate at any meaningful scale.
Put in plain words:
If lending, derivatives, LP strategies and RWAs want to truly run, they first need a trading market deep enough.
And one of the core liquidity protocols Arc chose is Uniswap. (Arc)
This is also why I started to reframe how I see Uniswap.
We used to look at Uniswap as:
A decentralized exchange.
Maybe now we should switch to a different angle:
The default liquidity infrastructure once new assets come onchain.
Robinhood issuing stock tokens needs liquidity.
Pons issuing memes needs liquidity.
Circle building Arc needs liquidity.
BlackRock's BUIDL coming onchain needs liquidity.
Stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps need liquidity.
And when more stocks, funds, bonds and commodities go onchain in the future, they will still need liquidity.
Who actually issues the asset doesn't really matter.
As long as an asset needs to trade, Uniswap has a chance to participate.
05 | How Big Is Uniswap Itself Right Now?
Now look at Uniswap's own numbers.
Uniswap previously disclosed that the protocol's cumulative trading volume had reached about $4 trillion. (Uniswap Labs)
And per the most recent DeFiLlama data:
Uniswap:
24-hour trading volume about $3.35 billion
about $19.6 billion over 7 days
about $67.4 billion over 30 days
The entire DEX market over the same 30 days saw roughly $240 billion in trading volume.
Simple calculation:
674 ÷ 2400 ≈ 28%
That is, today a single protocol, Uniswap, accounts for about 28% of all DEX 30-day trading volume.
Based on the most recent 24-hour data, the share is even around 33%. (DefiLlama)
This is no longer the scale of a "niche DeFi app".
And the biggest difference between Uniswap now and Uniswap before:
UNI has started to genuinely capture protocol value.
After UNIfication passed at the end of 2025, Uniswap began gradually turning on Protocol Fee and using protocol fees for programmatic UNI burns. The scope later expanded from Ethereum to networks including Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, and Robinhood Chain. (Uniswap Labs)
Robinhood Chain has recently become a very important source of the UNI burn.
In one set of data from September 3 to 9:
Robinhood Chain contributed about 71.9% of Uniswap's Protocol Revenue.
On September 4, Uniswap Holder Revenue reached about $1.15 million, of which roughly $925,000 came from Robinhood Chain.
That is, about 80% of the value flowing back that day came from this single new chain that had been live for barely over two months. (The Traders Spread)
This is the change I find genuinely worth paying attention to.
Before, no matter how large Uniswap's trading volume was, many people would still ask:
What does that have to do with UNI?
Now this question is slowly getting an answer:
Trading → Protocol Fee → UNI Burn.
More chains, more assets, more trades - and more fees potentially available to capture.
06 | Why I Think Uniswap May Be One of the Biggest Winners of This Cycle
I increasingly like one investment logic:
Don't guess who will find gold; study who is selling the shovels.
Can Robinhood Chain become the biggest RWA chain?
No idea.
Can Arc become the main settlement network for institutional finance?
No idea.
Can Pons beat Pump.fun?
No idea either.
And which meme will do a 100x in the future - even fewer people know.
But all of these things share one common need:
Liquidity.
As long as assets come onchain, they need to trade.
As long as there is trading, there needs to be a market.
Uniswap is working hard to become that default market.
Robinhood Chain provides a very good case study:
Robinhood built the chain, Pons issued the tokens.
Users traded frantically.
In the end, Uniswap quietly took on over 80% of the chain's DEX trading volume from behind the scenes.
Even Pons's own success further fed assets and trading volume into Uniswap V4.
This is what makes the infrastructure position so comfortable.
It doesn't need to guess which token will win.
The more winners there are, the more money it makes.
07 | A Look at the Other Token I Hold: CAKE
Speaking of this, I want to bring up another project I hold: PancakeSwap.
I also hold CAKE, and have held it for a long time, so this isn't about putting one project down to hype another. But the more I study Uniswap, the more I feel that PancakeSwap's biggest problem may not be that its product is weak, but that it has never truly shaken off the label BSC gave it.
Strictly speaking, PancakeSwap has of course long since moved beyond BSC. It has deployed on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Solana, even Robinhood Chain, and it has shipped quite a lot of products. This year PancakeSwap even tried its hand at stocks, ETFs, RWAs, cross-chain trading and perpetuals.
But the problem is:
Products leaving BSC is not the same as the moat leaving BSC.
PancakeSwap's strongest ground today is still BSC.
Over the last 30 days, DEX trading volume across all of BSC was about $34.7 billion, of which PancakeSwap itself did about $24.5 billion, accounting for roughly 70%.
That result is actually very impressive.
But from another angle, this may also be CAKE's biggest problem.
On BSC, PancakeSwap is the absolute king; but outside BSC, it is very hard for it to replicate that dominance.
Base has Aerodrome and Uniswap, Ethereum is Uniswap's home turf, Solana has its own liquidity ecosystem. Even on Robinhood Chain, which PancakeSwap only entered this year, the one still holding the vast majority of trading volume right now is Uniswap.
So my biggest worry about CAKE today is not whether PancakeSwap will die.
I think most likely it won't.
Its base on BSC remains very strong, with 35 consecutive months of CAKE net deflation; as of July this year, PancakeSwap officially disclosed that cumulative trading volume on BNB Chain had exceeded $4 trillion.
The real question is:
Where does its next round of growth come from?
This is also the thing I have found harder and harder to figure out since I started holding CAKE.
If BSC explodes, PancakeSwap will naturally benefit.
But if the next biggest increment comes from Robinhood Chain, Arc, Base, Ethereum, from stocks, RWAs and stablecoins coming onchain as new assets, can PancakeSwap become the default liquidity layer there the way it is on BSC?
From what I can see now, I think that is very hard.
Look at Uniswap in contrast, and what I see is a different route.
It doesn't need to bet on any single chain.
It is on Ethereum.
It is on Base.
It is on Arbitrum.
It is on BNB Chain too.
Robinhood Chain made it the primary public AMM on launch day one.
After Pons exploded, its graduated assets went directly into Uniswap V4.
Next, when the Arc mainnet launches, it shows up again in the core liquidity infrastructure.
And now, even on BSC - PancakeSwap's strongest home turf - Uniswap is already taking market share. In CoinGecko's recent BSC DEX data, Uniswap V4 + V3's share of trading volume is already over a quarter.
This is what I find most daunting about Uniswap.
PancakeSwap is more like the Uniswap of BSC.
What Uniswap wants to be is:
The Uniswap of every chain.
I hold CAKE myself, so of course I want it to go up.
But if I had to re-compare the long-term headroom of these two projects today, I would indeed lean increasingly toward Uniswap.
Not because PancakeSwap doesn't make money, and not because CAKE's tokenomics are bad.
But because:
CAKE's base is strong, but its growth boundary is becoming easier to see.
Uniswap's base is already strong, and its boundary is still expanding outward.
08 | Finally
Uniswap has already gone from a simple decentralized exchange to being
The liquidity layer for onchain assets.
In the past, crypto mainly traded BTC, ETH and memes.
If the future really brings:
stocks onchain, funds onchain, treasuries onchain, a stablecoin explosion, RWAs onchain, AI agents trading automatically...
then all these assets will ultimately need somewhere to complete price discovery and liquidity exchange.
Robinhood Chain has already begun proving this logic.
After the Arc mainnet launches on September 16, we will soon see a second case study.
If more and more things start going onchain, who is providing them with trading infrastructure?
So far, Uniswap already stands in a very comfortable position.
Others create the assets.
Others manufacture the hype.
Others attract the users.
Uniswap collects the toll.
This may well be the most worth-studying business of this bull market.
I want to state clearly here: I hold both UNI and CAKE myself, and have held them for over 4 years.
So this article is not about putting CAKE down to hype UNI, nor is it looking for reasons to justify my own positions.
Quite the opposite - precisely because I bought both, recently studied Robinhood Chain and Pons, and now see Arc about to launch, I have felt more and more clearly: PancakeSwap's base is still very strong, but Uniswap's headroom may be bigger.
In my view, CAKE's biggest problem is not that PancakeSwap doesn't make money, nor that it will disappear, but that its strongest moat remains concentrated on BSC.
Uniswap, meanwhile, is doing something else entirely: whether the next breakout is Robinhood Chain, Arc, or some other future chain, it wants to be the default liquidity infrastructure for these assets once they come onchain.
Of course, a protocol developing well does not mean the token price will necessarily rise. Whether market share and protocol revenue can ultimately keep converting into value for UNI still needs continued observation.
I hold both tokens myself, so the views in this article are inevitably influenced by my own understanding and my positions.
This article merely records my current-stage research and judgment on Uniswap and PancakeSwap, and does not constitute investment advice.
If any data or understanding is inaccurate, everyone is welcome to point it out directly in the comments.
After all, you can buy the wrong token, but the logic can't stay wrong forever. 😂
Thanks for reading this far, and discussion is always welcome.
Jiuge | lgk