This piece outlines a grant update to Ross on the Community Router ('UniswapV4Router04') designed to streamline development and testing on Uniswap v4 as an optimized alternative to the Universal Router.

The Uniswap Foundation committed $35,000 to Ross for developing a v4 optimized router as an alternative to the Universal Router. With support from Sauce, the Community Router ('UniswapV4Router04') is now available for developers, addressing the learning curve for v4 integration. It functions as a semantic translator for v4's architecture.

The Community Router enhances development through:

• v2-Inspired Interface: Applies familiar functions that developers already understand from v2 to v4

• Gas Optimization: Provides an effective way to cheaply swap on v4 pools

• Calldata Compression: Includes native compression in the fallback to reduce costs on L2 networks

• Cross-Chain Consistency: Implements create3 to maintain the same address across all chains despite different constructor settings

While both routers, Universal Router and Router04, support basic functionality like Single Hop, Multi Hop, Hook Support, and IMsgSender, the Community Router adds six additional capabilities that the Universal Router lacks: ERC6909 tokensupport for handling fungible token standards, a streamlined ABI for cleaner integration, easy forkable architecture for customization, calldata optimizations for reduced transaction costs, and Permit2 Signature functionality for improved transaction flow. Most importantly, Universal Router includes Uni v2 and v3 support, which the Community Router intentionally lacks in order to focus exclusively on v4 optimizations.

We look forward to seeing how this router improves the developer experience for teams building on Uniswap v4. If you're working on a project to swap exclusively on v4 pools, building interfaces for v4 functionality, or testing and creating new hooks for the v4 ecosystem, the Community Router is for you.