Cross-posted from ai-frb.com — the canonical version lives on the FRB Research blog. This DEV.to mirror exists so the dev community can engage in comments.
Answer first — Uniswap V4 hooks turn each pool into a programmable contract with custom logic at swap, modify-liquidity, and donate boundaries. For searchers, this creates three new opportunity categories — custom-curve arbitrage between hook-altered prices and reference AMMs, dynamic-fee front-of-block races where hook fee logic can be predicted, and JIT-style liquidity hooks that legally extract value via beforeSwap/afterSwap callbacks. It also introduces new risks: hook reentrancy traps, asymmetric gas costs, and pool-specific simulation requirements that break "universal" arb bots designed for V2/V3 invariants.
What Hooks Actually Change
A V4 pool isn't just x * y = k with a fee tier. It's a PoolKey plus a deployed IHooks contract that can interpose logic at up to ten callback points:
Callback
