Projects built around Uniswap v4 Hooks are starting to multiply, but whether any of them can turn Hook-based design into a real business is still an open question.
In a report by KarenZ, Foresight News reviewed eight relatively active Hook-related projects: Hookr, StonkBrokers, What The Hook, Bordrless, The Standard Reserve, Programmable, Claus and Fables Finance. The piece focuses on how developers are using Hooks to push on-chain trading beyond standard automated market maker behavior.
What Hooks do in Uniswap v4
The report describes Uniswap as the base trading infrastructure, with Hooks acting as a way to attach custom rules to specific pools.
In Uniswap v4, a Hook is an external smart contract attached to a liquidity pool. It can run custom logic before or after actions such as pool creation, adding or removing liquidity, and swaps. That gives developers room to design different rules for different markets. Fees can change with market conditions, trades can trigger rewards, and pools can plug into specialized pricing or order mechanisms.
Hooks are not a brand-new feature. The report notes that they were already one of the core innovations when Uniswap v4 went live in January 2025. What has changed is visibility: more projects are now being built around Hooks, bringing a once developer-heavy concept into the view of a broader group of crypto investors.
Three risks the report highlights
Foresight News says many of the Hook ecosystem projects now drawing attention are still in the product and market validation phase, especially when compared with more established DeFi protocols.
Smart-contract and technical risk
Because Hooks can execute custom logic during the trading flow, they expand the amount of code that needs to be reviewed. The report says Uniswap v4’s underlying infrastructure having gone through development and testing does not mean every third-party Hook inherits the same security profile. More complex trading logic can also produce unexpected execution outcomes.
It points to custom accounting, external oracles, dynamic fees and upgradeable permissions as factors that may affect trading and liquidity safety.
Liquidity and price volatility
Early tokens often trade in smaller pools, where limited buying or selling can move prices sharply. The report says investors should look beyond token price and market capitalization and check actual tradable liquidity, holder concentration, bundling, token minting permissions and the trading behavior of large holders.
Product value may not translate into token value
A Hook can deliver useful functionality without guaranteeing that its token captures protocol revenue. Claimed trading volume, fee generation, buyback mechanisms or revenue-sharing structures all need to be examined on their own terms.
The report makes two points plainly: deploying on Uniswap v4 does not mean a project has official backing from Uniswap, and using Hook technology does not mean a sustainable business model is already in place. For that reason, the projects below are framed as an early watchlist rather than investment recommendations.
Hookr
Hookr is focused on making Hooks easier for developers and project teams to combine, deploy and use. It runs on Robinhood Chain, supports new token launches and also allows users to create new Uniswap v4 pools for existing assets.
Creators can choose Hook Blocks such as dynamic fees, anti-sniping, auto-burn and LP rewards, then apply different rules to different pools. Its product set has expanded to include Builder, a Hook directory, an SDK and HookrScan.
The report says the appeal of Hookr is not limited to token issuance. A bigger question is whether it can lower the barrier to using Hooks in practice: helping traders understand pool rules, letting developers reuse modules and allowing other products to plug into those markets.
That flexibility comes with trade-offs. The more composable features a platform offers, the more important it becomes to verify the exact configuration of each pool. Hookr’s website also states that its contracts have undergone adversarial review but have not yet received an external audit.
According to GMGN data cited in the report, HOOKR has a current market capitalization of $26.5 million and a peak market capitalization of $31.43 million.
StonkBrokers
StonkBrokers, also on Robinhood Chain, is described as a DeFi infrastructure and experimentation suite focused on stock tokens, Uniswap v4 Hooks and liquidity pools.
It combines DeFi tools with tokenized U.S. equities on Robinhood Chain while also offering an NFT community, a launchpad and incubation functions. The team says its Special Projects arm acts as an "on-chain Y Combinator," providing rails, liquidity and community distribution for early-stage projects.
The report says that on Oct. 14, Beijing time, StonkBrokers used Uniswap v4 Hook functionality in collaboration with Hookr to create a new token type called a Pair Token, described as a fused, auto-compounding ERC-20.
The idea is to merge two tokens into one new token, such as ETH + NVDA = ETHNVDA or NVDA + TSLA = NVDATSLA. Each Pair Token represents a proportional share of the corresponding full-range Uniswap v4 liquidity pool.
On fees, minting and redemption are free. Auto-compounding carries a 10% fee on LP fees, which is used for STONKBROKER buybacks.
GMGN data cited in the article puts STONKBROKER at a current market capitalization of $15 million, with a peak of $95.75 million on Aug. 12.
What The Hook
What The Hook, or WTH, has a more defined product angle: redistributing arbitrage profits across pools.
In AMM trading, temporary price gaps can appear between different liquidity pools because of trading activity. Arbitrage traders profit by buying and selling across those gaps, which also pushes prices back toward alignment. What The Hook is not trying to remove arbitrage. It is trying to change who ends up receiving the profit.
According to its documentation, the protocol uses a Uniswap v4 Hook on Robinhood Chain to check price differences between linked pools. If execution conditions are met and a profit remains after costs, it executes the arbitrage and allocates the realized proceeds.
The documentation lists two distribution models:
- For WTH’s own trading pools, traders receive 10% of captured arbitrage profit and the WTH treasury receives 90%.
- For third-party integrated pools, the default split sends 5% to traders, 45% to the liquidity pool, 40% to the WTH treasury and 10% to referral partners.
The report stresses that these percentages apply to successfully captured arbitrage profit, and that the split can be adjusted for specific partner deployments.
Its business logic is straightforward: if more third-party pools integrate the Hook, the protocol could earn revenue from a broader set of arbitrage events. But the report also points to practical limits. Arbitrage opportunities do not appear on every trade, and competitive arbitrage, transaction costs, market depth and the number of integrated pools all affect the final outcome. Just as important, revenue flowing to the WTH treasury does not automatically mean direct distributions to WTH token holders.
According to GMGN data, WTH has a current market capitalization of $6.4 million.
Programmable
Programmable (@ProgrammableHQ) is a token and custom project launch platform built on Uniswap v4. It offers a no-code modular launch path as well as custom launch interfaces for developers. The platform currently supports Ethereum mainnet and Robinhood Chain.
It offers two main routes.
The first is Module Mode, where users select compatible modules on the website and configure parameters without writing a full smart contract themselves.
The second is Custom Launch, where developers can use their own token, Hook or related contracts and prepare a launch through an API.
The report groups Programmable with Hookr as part of a broader effort to lower the deployment barrier for customized markets. Over time, it says, the competitive edge for this type of platform may depend more on module quality, integration depth and real usage than on the number of short-term launches.
As of publication, among tokens launched through Programmable, Claus had reached a market capitalization of $6.42 million. Programmable’s own token on Robinhood Chain, V4, was at about $4.64 million, while another project, Temo, stood at $450,000.
Claus
Claus (CLAUS) is an experimental project built on Ethereum using a Uniswap v4 Hook and launched through Programmable.
Its core feature is that after the token is issued, functionality can be added, modified or removed by updating the Hook contract, without having to issue a new token.
Fables Finance
Fables Finance is a decentralized exchange on Robinhood Chain built with Uniswap v4 Hooks. It combines a ve(3,3) token model with programmable pools and is aimed at making liquidity incentives and trading fee distribution more flexible.
One of its main features is the use of Hooks to set dynamic fees for different pools, adjusting trading costs based on conditions such as market volatility in an effort to improve the return structure for liquidity providers.
It also introduces a ve(3,3) mechanism that ties together token locking, governance voting and liquidity incentives, allowing participants to influence how incentives are allocated.
The Standard Reserve
The Standard Reserve uses Hooks for an on-chain monetary policy experiment.
According to the report, its designated ETH/STANDARD pool tracks net ETH flows, and a "central bank" contract adjusts issuance based on that signal: sustained inflows correspond to supply expansion and reserve accumulation, while outflows correspond to supply contraction, paired with a buyback-and-burn mechanism.
GMGN data cited in the article shows STANDARD at a current market capitalization of $26.17 million.
Bordrless
Bordrless is treated separately in the report because it does not directly use Uniswap v4 Hooks. Instead, it uses a self-developed Hook mechanism on Solana.
The project is building its own token standard, DEX and launch platform on Solana, allowing developers to write custom rules for token transfers, minting, burning and trading.
For example, developers can design a mechanism where part of each token trade is automatically sent to a designated account while another portion is burned. Fee rules can also change based on holding time or market conditions.
The broader idea is to make the token itself more programmable while using the accompanying DEX and launchpad to host trading and issuance activity.
As of publication, only two tokens launched through the Bordrless Launchpad had market capitalizations between $100,000 and $200,000. The rest were in the range of several thousand to several tens of thousands of dollars.
According to GMGN data, BORDR has a current market capitalization of $6.4 million.
What comes next
Across these product paths, the report says Hooks are pushing trading pools to do more: combine issuance rules, redistribute arbitrage profits, support reserve mechanisms, provide governance signals and respond to the market risks of different assets.
The more important questions from here are whether those custom rules create real value, whether outside users or projects are willing to keep using them, and whether that usage can turn into verifiable protocol revenue.
More projects may learn how to build with Hooks. The report’s conclusion is narrower: the projects that can build a real business on top of Hooks still need time to prove it.
The article also carries a disclaimer stating that markets involve risk, investment requires caution, the piece does not constitute investment advice, and readers should judge whether any opinion, view or conclusion fits their own circumstances before making decisions.
