Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange, recorded an unprecedented $1.4 million in daily trading fees on January 9, 2026, setting a new all-time high. However, this financial milestone was driven not by organic market growth but by panic selling in the aftermath of a major security breach. The data, initially shared by Wu Blockchain based on a dashboard from on-chain analyst Marcov, revealed that nearly $1.3 million of the total fees came from frantic trading of the TRU token alone.
The catalyst was a devastating smart contract exploit targeting the Truebit Protocol, an older Ethereum project designed for off-chain computation. Hackers discovered a flaw in an active legacy contract, enabling them to mint a massive number of TRU tokens at minimal cost. They then sold these tokens into liquidity pools, draining approximately 8,535 ETH (worth about $26 million) from the system. The Truebit team confirmed the security incident on January 8, warning users not to interact with the affected contract and stating they were in contact with law enforcement.
The market reaction was immediate and brutal. The price of the TRU token collapsed by over 99%, plummeting from around $0.07 to near zero. This triggered a massive wave of sell orders on Uniswap, flooding its liquidity pools and generating record-high transaction volume. Uniswap's fee model, which takes a small percentage from every trade, capitalized on this chaos, leading to the historic fee capture.
This event underscores the persistent risks in decentralized finance (DeFi). While Uniswap demonstrated its capacity to handle extreme volume without interruption, the incident highlighted the dangers of vulnerabilities in older, unaudited smart contracts. The Truebit hack was part of a string of late-2025 security breaches, including a $3.9 million counterfeit token incident on the Flow network and a $7 million exploit of the Trust Wallet Chrome extension. Despite these high-profile attacks, aggregate industry losses from hacks fell to about $76 million in December from $194 million in November, according to data from PeckShield.
