V4 Hooks Created 2500 Custom Pools and 150 Strategies, Uniswap Reclaimed 36% DEX Market Share, and the Protocol Now Generates $26M Annual Revenue - The Technical Moat Is Real

ethereum_emma
Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:00:02 +0000

A Builder’s Honest Take on Developing V4 Hooks

I have been building hooks for the past several months and wanted to share what the developer experience actually looks like from the trenches, because the architecture is impressive but the tooling story is more nuanced than the headline numbers suggest.

First, the good. The V4 hook interface is genuinely well-designed. The eight callback points Brian described give you surgical precision over pool behavior without touching the core AMM logic. When I built my first hook – a simple dynamic fee adjuster based on a Chainlink volatility feed – the mental model clicked quickly. You implement the IHooks interface, deploy your contract to an address with the right leading bytes (this encodes which callbacks you use), and attach it at pool creation. The separation of concerns is clean.

The v4-periphery repository and the hook template from Uniswap Labs gave me a solid starting point. Foundry is essentially the required toolkit here – Hardhat support exists but the Foundry test suite for hooks is significantly more mature. The PoolManager test helpers let you spin up a full singleton environment locally, create pools with your hook attached, and simulate swaps in under 30 lines of test code. That part I genuinely appreciated.

Where the Developer Experience Gets Rough

Now the hard parts. Address mining for hooks is a real friction point. Because your hook’s permissions are encoded in the contract address, you need to find a CREATE2 salt that produces an address with the correct leading bytes. For hooks that use multiple callbacks, this can take minutes of brute-force computation. There are helper scripts, but it feels like an unnecessary barrier that could be abstracted away.

Debugging hook failures is also painful. When a hook reverts inside a swap, the error propagation through the PoolManager is not always transparent. I spent two full days tracking down a revert that turned out to be a storage collision between my hook’s state and the PoolManager’s transient storage during flash accounting. The error message was unhelpful – just a generic revert with no context about which callback failed or why.

Testing composability between hooks and external protocols is where things get complex. My current project integrates a hook with an external lending protocol, and simulating the full interaction flow requires mocking multiple contract states. The tooling for this kind of integration testing does not exist yet in a polished form.

How It Compares to Building on Other DEX Protocols

Having built on Balancer’s custom pool framework and Curve’s factory patterns, V4 hooks are a clear step forward in expressiveness. Balancer gives you custom invariant curves but not the fine-grained lifecycle control that hooks provide. Curve’s pools are powerful but opaque and hard to extend. The V4 hook model is the first DEX architecture I have worked with that genuinely feels like a platform rather than a protocol.

That said, the ecosystem is still early. Documentation has gaps, especially around edge cases in flash accounting interactions with hooks. The community of hook developers is growing but small – maybe 200-300 active builders based on GitHub activity. I would love to see Uniswap Labs invest more in developer relations and hook-specific tooling. The architecture deserves better onboarding than it currently has.

For anyone considering building hooks: start with the v4-template repo, use Foundry, and join the hooks channel in the Uniswap Discord. The learning curve is real but manageable if you already know Solidity well.