Uniswap’s v4 architecture has now seen more than 90,000 unique hooks initialized and attached to at least one deployed pool. That number, tracked via on-chain data dashboards including Dune Analytics, represents a roughly fourfold increase from the approximately 22,600 hooks recorded earlier this year.

For a feature that didn’t exist before January 2025, that’s a steep adoption curve.

What hooks actually do

Think of hooks as plug-ins for liquidity pools. In Uniswap v4, developers can write custom smart contract logic that executes at specific points in a pool’s lifecycle: before a swap, after a swap, when liquidity is added, when it’s removed, and so on.

Before v4, if you wanted a pool to behave differently, say with dynamic fees that adjust based on volatility, you essentially needed to fork the protocol or build on top of it. Hooks let developers modify pool behavior without touching the core protocol code.