UNI Beat SOL Over 90 Days. Its Drawdowns Were Uglier, Too

Over the last 90 days, Uniswap's UNI token gained 97.3%. Solana's SOL gained 36.7%. Holding UNI meant paying for that lead with swings that would have shaken out plenty of people: annualized volatility of 108.7%, against 59.9% for SOL.

That's the headline. The interesting part is underneath it.

A caveat first. What everyone wants to know is whether spot trading is leaving Uniswap pools for Solana DEXs, or moving the other way. Our data pack has no DEX volume or market share figures, so we can't measure that migration here, and I won't pretend otherwise. What we can measure is how the market priced the two tokens: returns, volatility, worst stretches, and how tightly they move together. Price is a running verdict on the liquidity story. It's an indirect read, but an honest one.

The scoreboard

The pattern holds across every row. UNI climbed further, fell further, and moved more on its best and worst days. No metric here shows UNI as the calmer of the two.

Same direction, bigger swings

SOL and UNI had a correlation of 0.61 over the window. That's meaningfully positive: on most days, when one rose, the other tended to as well. It isn't lockstep, though. At 0.61 there's plenty of room for the two to part ways in any given week.

Set that beside the volatility gap and the shape is familiar. UNI acted like the higher-beta leg of a shared trade. The market pushed both the same general way, and UNI amplified the move. We haven't calculated a formal beta, so read that as a description of behavior, not a coefficient.

Size explains some of it. SOL's market cap is $62.8 billion; UNI's is $4.66 billion. Smaller assets take less money to move, and they overshoot in both directions. What each token represents matters too. SOL is the base asset of an entire chain. UNI is tied to one family of exchange protocols, which makes it a narrower, more leveraged bet on how that business is perceived.

September did most of the work

Look at the dates. UNI's worst day was Sep 9, at -10.4%. Eight days later, on Sep 17, it posted its best: +17.1%. SOL's worst day, Sep 15 at -5.7%, landed between those two. SOL's best came earlier, on Aug 19, at +12.7%.

So early to late September is where the two tokens fought hardest. UNI lurched around within days. Then both topped out close together, UNI on Sep 22 and SOL on Sep 25.

And both bottomed on the same day: Oct 17.

That shared low matters. Two assets with a 0.61 correlation hitting their trough on the same date suggests the selloff from late September to mid-October was a broad move, not something peculiar to Uniswap or Solana. Whatever drove it hit both. UNI simply fell further: 30.1% from its high, against 15.7% for SOL.

Is volatility compressing?

Here I have to be careful. The consolidation story says the market has calmed and swings are narrowing. Our pack gives volatility for the whole 90-day window, not a rolling or recent figure, so these numbers can't confirm compression.

What we can say is this. Both tokens' largest single-day moves came in August and September, not October. Their drawdowns ended four days before our data cutoff. Both still finished well above where they started. That fits a market that shook out weak hands in a sharp drop and is now sitting near the recent low. It also fits a pause before another leg down. The data can't separate the two yet.

Bet on compression and you're betting on something the last 90 days haven't shown.

What the prices say about the DEX fight

Without volume data, here's the most I'll claim. Over this window the market rewarded UNI far more than SOL, and did it violently enough to suggest traders treat UNI as a speculative, high-conviction bet rather than a settled one. If capital were steadily and obviously leaving Uniswap, a 97.3% gain would be an odd way to show it. If it were flowing decisively toward Uniswap, you'd expect a calmer climb than one with a 30.1% drawdown in the middle.

The honest read is that the market is still arguing. A 108.7% annualized volatility is what arguing looks like.

What this means for you

If you hold

• UNI's return was bigger, and so was the pain. As an example, a $1,000 UNI position bought at the start of the window nearly doubled, yet it gave back close to a third of its value between Sep 22 and Oct 17. Ask yourself whether you'd have held through that.
• Holding both doesn't diversify you much. At 0.61 correlation, they fell together into the same Oct 17 low.
• SOL's 15.7% max drawdown made it the steadier of the two by every measure here.

If you trade

• UNI has behaved like a leveraged version of the same move SOL makes. That's useful if you want more exposure to a direction, and dangerous if you size it like SOL.
• Position size should reflect the volatility gap. The same dollar amount in UNI carries noticeably more daily risk.
• Single days moved UNI 17.1% up and 10.4% down. Tight stops will get hit by noise.

If you gamble

• Bets on daily or weekly price ranges for UNI need wider bands than the same bet on SOL. Its range was simply bigger.
• Don't assume calm is here. Nothing in this pack proves volatility is shrinking.
• As an example, if you'd stake $100 on a SOL move, staking the same $100 on a same-sized UNI move isn't the same bet. UNI hits those levels far more often, and the odds you're offered should reflect that.

The open question is one prices can't answer. When DEX volume data does settle the market-share fight, will UNI's swings shrink toward SOL's, or was 108.7% the real price of owning it?

How we did the math

We used daily closing prices from our own price history over the 90-day window ending Oct 21, 2026. Volatility is the standard deviation of daily log returns, annualized. The SOL/UNI correlation is a Pearson correlation of daily returns over the same window.