Have you heard of projects regularly burning tokens to maintain their value? But what if I told you there’s a type of token where the right to burn is entirely in the hands of retail investors, and the project team can’t even interfere?

UNI has just introduced such a novel feature. The recent burning data might seem insignificant—only 24,000 tokens— but the underlying mechanism design is what makes this system truly impressive.

**Community Decides: Decentralizing the Burning Rights**

How does the traditional model work? The project team holds the burning rights and operates periodically—essentially a centralized approach. UNI does the opposite: as long as you can gather transaction fees worth 4,000 tokens—possibly across multiple liquidity pools—you can trigger a burn directly through a smart contract. No approval needed, no waiting, fully decentralized logic.

Currently, the market triggers a burn approximately every 6 to 8 hours. It sounds like a small amount, but what does this reflect? The real trading activity within the ecosystem, not just marketing efforts by a team. The motivation for burning comes from the transactions themselves, from the fees earned by liquidity providers—that’s what makes it sustainable.

**Why is it still so small? The answer lies in “Pools”**

Someone asked: Since anyone can initiate a burn, why is the amount so small? The reason is straightforward—there aren’t enough pools with open fee-sharing. Currently, only V2 and some V3 pools’ fees are integrated into the burn protocol, and many liquidity pools haven’t activated this feature at all.

Imagine a shopping mall where only a few stores have checkout counters; the transaction fees from other stores don’t go into the burn account. Once more pools open up, and their fee contributions increase, the frequency and scale of burns will also rise accordingly. That’s where UNI’s burn mechanism truly shows its potential.

This design isn’t just a technical innovation; it’s an exploration of new ideas in token economics: allowing the value from each transaction to contribute to the ecosystem’s self-optimization.