To accelerate v4 innovation, we’re excited to announce a new pilot grant program designed to help hook teams advance frontier DeFi infrastructure.
Uniswap v4 marked a turning point for DeFi: evolving the Uniswap protocol from a decentralized exchange to a platform for programmable liquidity, through the introduction of hooks. Hooks unlock the design space for new DeFi primitives, enabling novel features like dynamic fees, just-in-time liquidity, vault automation, rehypothecation, and more. To support their growth, we need to innovate a new playbook for builder support.
Our goal is to create the best place for DeFi developers to build: increasing the percentage of volume flowing to hooks, growing the number of v4 teams and apps, and expanding Unichain’s early developer ecosystem. Over the last year, Uniswap Foundation grants and programs have onboarded more than a thousand builders to v4, with 1,000+ hooks initialized. Now, our focus is on building out a sustainable model for developer success: accelerating teams from prototype to adoption.
This means going deeper. Hooks need more than great code to succeed. They need thoughtful product design, strong engineering, and distribution to attract liquidity, capture order flow, and find product market fit. Today, we’re excited to introduce the Hook Design Lab, a new grant initiative designed to accelerate v4 teams as they launch DeFi infrastructure on Unichain, and beyond.
What is the Hook Design Lab?
Over the last year, the Foundation expanded lifecycle support for builders, introducing education, funding, audit subsidies, and tooling to address critical resource gaps. We also learned that teams needed more support to guide product design, go-to-market, and distribution.
The Uniswap v4 Hook Design Lab is a pilot grant program structured to support DeFi builders: helping teams bring new ecosystem primitives from idea to mainnet, by providing technical mentorship, go-to-market strategy, milestone-based funding, and ecosystem alignment.
Program approach:
Building on initiatives like the Uniswap Hook Incubator and the Uniswap Foundation Security Fund, the Hook Design Lab provides teams with hands-on, 360 support. This focused, intensive format is designed to drive faster outcomes, and generate new learnings that can inform a broader playbook for DeFi builder growth.
Help teams build DeFi protocols that solve problems for users: Provide support for product design, protocol engineering, audits, and go-to-market strategy.
Create for real-world capital efficiency: Demonstrate value to LPs and integrators through strategic asset mapping and data-driven calibration.
Integrate with routers, aggregators, and interfaces: Provide holistic distribution and integration support, embedding hooks into the way people use the Uniswap protocol every day.
To further encourage ecosystem adoption, the program includes router rebates for flow through hooked pools. Routers can claim daily subsidies covering up to 80% of gas fees per swap, capped at 50 gwei per transaction, for the duration of the hook liquidity incentive campaigns. Routers, solvers, and aggregators interested in participating can apply here.
While the Uniswap Foundation provides technical guidance to participating teams, it does not maintain or operate participating protocols, nor does it own participating protocol licenses.
Cohort 01 Focus Areas
Hook Design Lab Cohort 01 focuses on three core areas:
JIT Liquidity: Hooks that allow LPs to deposit funds into a trading pool at the exact moment a swap is initiated and withdraw immediately after, maximizing capital efficiency while minimizing exposure to impermanent loss. For swappers, this enables more competitive prices, and less slippage.
Dynamic Fees: Hooks that allow pool creators to implement fees that can change with custom variables, like volatility; offering adaptive protection for LPs.
Rehypothecation: Hooks that allow LPs to reuse deposited liquidity while it’s in the pool, increasing capital efficiency by creating productive liquidity. LPs can put their deposited assets to work while still providing liquidity; improving TVL productivity and composability.
Meet the Teams
Hook Type: JIT Liquidity
EulerSwap is a new DEX that integrates Euler’s lending infrastructure with v4 hook architecture. Liquidity providers deposit assets that simultaneously earn lending yield, facilitate swaps, and can be used as collateral to borrow other tokens. This design improves capital efficiency by allowing LPs to deploy a single asset across multiple strategies, including JIT liquidity, hedging, and custom AMM curve control.
Hook Type: Dynamic Fee
Built by Solo Labs, the Aegis dynamic fee hook introduces a fully on-chain, self-regulating dynamic fee system built with Uniswap v4 hooks. It adjusts swap fees per block based on real-time price movement, protecting LPs against spikes, MEV, and toxic flow while optimizing yield during volatility.
Hook Type: Dynamic Fee
Renzo’s Dynamo DEX protocol is a dynamic fee hook that's specifically designed to maintain price stability for pegged LRT assets like ezETH/ETH, through a variable fee structure: protecting against depegs in LRTs and automating LP management.
Hook Type: Rehypothecation
Bunni offers liquidity density functions, rehypothecation, autonomous rebalancing, and shapeshifting; dynamically adjusting the LP positions with market conditions. LPs can shift liquidity to different ticks, slightly change a curve, or switch curves.
Each project selected for the program brings a unique approach to capital efficiency, LP experience, target asset classes, and composability. Hooks with a custom curve introduce a mechanism for protocol fee sharing with Uniswap Governance, while all other hooks comply with the standard protocol fee terms.
Growing DeFi together
The Hook Design Lab is a pilot grant program built to help teams go from idea to impact, and the first step towards a scalable DeFi builder playbook. Our goal is to create scalable support models that help v4 teams launch faster, grow more sustainably, and find a lasting home in our community. If you’re ready to launch, sign up to learn more about future cohorts.
This pilot grant initiative is made possible with support from teams across the Uniswap ecosystem, including: 33Audits, ABDK Consulting, Areta, Certora, Chain Security, Consensys Diligence, Cyfrin, Dedaub, Fuzzland, Gauntlet, Guardian, Hacken, Halborn, Mixbytes, OpenZeppelin, Spearbit Labs (Cantina), Trail of Bits, Tycho, Uniswap Labs, and Zellic.
Unichain and Uniswap v4 enable a diverse variety of project development, and any of those projects might touch on different areas of laws or regulations in different forums. The Uniswap Foundation encourages compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, and it is incumbent upon builders to consult with legal counsel as appropriate to determine the legal requirements and restrictions (if any) for their projects.
While participating teams have received audit subsidies and completed audits, these projects are novel. Users and integrators should exercise independent judgment and proceed with caution. The Uniswap Foundation is not responsible for the performance or security of third-party projects.