Uniswap Investment Calculator
What would buying UNI have been worth? Pick a plan and a start date and this replays it against real daily Uniswap closes.
What UNI actually did, in the data this page replays
Measured from the 2,188 daily closes this page replays — 17 September 2020 to 13 September 2026, from Binance. Figures are bounded by that window, not by the asset’s whole life.
| History available | 6 years (from Binance) |
|---|---|
| Bought on the first day, held to the last | 1.84× |
| Highest close in this window | $43.11 on 4 May 2021 |
| Where it sits against that high | 85.3% below |
| Deepest fall | −94.4%, 4 May 2021 → 10 June 2026 |
| Time to get back to that peak | still below it |
| Separate falls of 50% or more | 2 |
| Days spent more than 20% below a previous peak | 94% |
| Best calendar year | 2021: +259% |
| Worst calendar year | 2022: -70.4% |
| Annualised volatility | 120.4% |
UNI year by year
First close to last close each year. 2020 and 2026 are partial — the data starts mid-2020 and 2026 is still running.
| Year | Change | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | +48.8% | partial year |
| 2021 | +259% | best full year |
| 2022 | -70.4% | worst full year |
| 2023 | +37.6% | |
| 2024 | +74.3% | |
| 2025 | -58.6% | |
| 2026 | +9.4% | partial year |
The part the calculator does not show you
Held from the first day in this data to the last, UNI returned 1.84×. That headline is the easy part. The number underneath it is that the position spent 94% of all days more than 20% below a previous peak — so for most of the time you owned it, you were looking at a figure lower than one you had already seen.
The deepest fall took UNI down 94.4%, from $43.11 on 4 May 2021 to $2.4 on 10 June 2026 — 5 years and 1 month of falling. UNI has not been back to that peak since. Anyone who bought on 4 May 2021 is still waiting, 11 months later — which is the scenario a backtest showing a positive average return quietly averages away.
At 120.4% annualised volatility, UNI sits in the top band of anything on this site — the drawdown figures above, not the average, are the number to plan around. All UNI calculators →
Frequently asked questions
＋Would buying UNI on the first day of this data and holding have made money?
Yes — 1.84× from 17 September 2020 to 13 September 2026. The figure is real but it is also the single luckiest entry available in this window, and it required holding through a fall of 94.4% on the way. Set the calculator to a date you might plausibly have chosen instead and the answer usually changes a great deal.
＋What is the worst UNI has fallen?
94.4% in this data, from 4 May 2021 down to 10 June 2026 — 5 years and 1 month of falling. It has not returned to that peak since, so anyone who bought at the top is still waiting. Bear in mind our UNI series starts in 2020; a deeper fall before that date would not appear here.
＋How often does UNI lose half its value?
2 separate falls of 50% or more appear in this data, and the position spent 94% of all days more than 20% below a previous peak. A drop of that size is not an exceptional event for this asset — it is a recurring feature of the record, which is the thing to size a position around.
＋What were UNI's best and worst years?
2021 was the best at +259%, and 2022 the worst at -70.4%. The gap between those two is the reason a single average annual return is a poor description of this asset: almost nobody experiences the average, they experience one of the two extremes depending on when they bought.
＋Is 6 years of data enough to trust this backtest?
Reasonably. 6 years spans roughly one full cycle for UNI — enough for the drawdown figure to mean something, not enough to call it a pattern. The assets here with a decade or more behind them support firmer conclusions.
What to keep in mind for UNI
UNI is a high-beta proxy for DeFi sentiment and has repriced hard on governance votes about the fee switch.
UNI lives mainly on Ethereum, so moving it costs Ethereum gas; the protocol itself is deployed across several layer 2s where swaps are far cheaper.
A backtest is one path that already happened. It shows what this plan produced through the exact sequence of prices UNI went through — not what a similar plan will produce through a sequence nobody has seen yet.