Introducing the Hooks Routing Rebate Program, powered by Brevis

Rethinking routing

Traditionally, routing has been relatively simple: find the best quote for two different assets across various liquidity pools. But today, routing has evolved into something much harder, and arguably more important. As AMMs have become more expressive, particularly through the introduction of Uniswap v4, the “best route” is no longer obvious.

Uniswap v4 introduces hooks, a mechanism that gives pool creators complete flexibility over how their pools behave. This means a pool can dynamically adjust its fees, modify liquidity parameters on the fly, or even interact with external protocols like lending markets. It’s an incredibly powerful feature: one that unlocks a whole new dimension of expressivity for liquidity provision.

But for routers, this creates a real problem.

Before, routers mostly needed to scan a fixed set of pools (e.g. 0.05%, 0.3%, 1% fee tiers) and rank them based on output amount and slippage. That logic was simple enough to encode. But in v4, there are no fixed fee tiers. Each pool can implement a completely different pricing function, and some of them might include conditions that are time-sensitive, state-dependent, or even purposefully obfuscated.

This means a router can easily miss better-priced trades, not because the liquidity isn’t there, but because the router doesn’t understand how to interpret the pool’s behavior. Should a router include a pool that adds a rebating hook? What about a pool that sends a fraction of your trade to an airdrop campaign? What if that pool is routing through a lending protocol on the backend, and temporarily has deeper liquidity due to a flash loan?

Worse, traders themselves don’t always care about the “best price” anymore.

Some swappers may want to opt into routing paths that optimize for point farming, or qualify them for future airdrops. Others might want yield-bearing swaps, where a portion of their trade earns back incentive tokens. In this world, "best execution" becomes subjective, and routers must become opinionated.

On the other side of the equation, LPs now have more ways to structure liquidity. A pool might use a hook to rehypothecate idle assets into lending markets, or implement an MEV-resistant pricing curve that favors slow-moving order flow. These LPs may be offering “deeper” liquidity in risk-adjusted terms—but if routers can’t recognize that, the pool gets ignored.

All of this leads to a paradox: Uniswap v4 enables more efficient markets, but also makes those markets harder to access. Fragmentation isn’t just across chains. It’s across logic, incentives, and preferences.

The Hooks Routing Rebate Program

Today, we’re excited to announce a new grant to Brevis to develop the Hooks Routing Rebate Program: an initiative designed to improve routing efficiency and accelerate adoption of hooked pools across the Uniswap ecosystem. Our goal is to alleviate early friction for routers, solvers, and aggregators integrating with Uniswap v4, while subsidizing experimentation and innovation in liquidity routing.

Using novel zk data coprocessors, Brevis will develop a secure snapshot system with their Pico ZKVM to enable routers to claim daily Routing Rebates, starting with historical and ongoing Unichain activity across all hooked pools, and expanding soon to mainnet, Base, and Arbitrum. By offsetting up to 85% of total gas costs, the program encourages routers to pass savings along to LPs and swappers, ensuring they consistently receive better execution.

Program Details

The program will roll out over the coming weeks, and will include a public dashboard for routing statistics and router tags (with an option for anonymity).

• Eligible Participants: All routers, solvers, and aggregators
• Eligible Activity: Routing through hooked pools on or after February 1, 2025
• Rebate Amount: Up to 85% of total gas costs per routed transaction, with up to $9M in rewards available

Supported Networks: Starting with Unichain (historical + future claims), with Mainnet, Base, and Arbitrum to follow

All routes lead to v4

Our goal is to make more efficient markets more accessible to everyone. If you’re a router, LP, or builder exploring hooked pools, we’d love to hear from you:

Learn more about hooks on Hook Atlas
Explore live hooks on Hook Rank