Programmable Volatility: Using Uniswap V4 Hooks for Graduated frfr.fun Tokens

Token launchpads have moved fast. What started as simple bonding-curve contracts on Ethereum mainnet has become specialized, low-cost liquidity infrastructure on Layer 2 networks — platforms like frfr.fun now let creators launch USDC-denominated community tokens on Base with fair-launch bonding curves and automated graduation to a DEX.

But graduation is where the design gets interesting. Once a bonding curve completes and liquidity moves to a decentralized exchange, it typically lands in a plain-vanilla constant-product pool. A pool like that treats every trade the same way, whether it's a retail buyer making a first purchase or a bot sandwiching that same buyer in the same block.

Uniswap V4 changes that equation. Live on Base since its January 31, 2025 mainnet launch, V4 introduces hooks — external smart contracts that plug into a pool's lifecycle and can execute custom logic before or after swaps, liquidity changes, or pool initialization. Paired with a bonding-curve launchpad's graduation event, hooks make it possible to attach programmable liquidity behavior — dynamic fees, anti-sniping limits, MEV mitigation — to a token the moment it hits the open market.

This piece breaks down how V4 hooks actually work, what's already been built with them on Base (including real, shipping products, not just theory), what a hook-enabled graduation pipeline could look like for a bonding-curve launchpad, and — critically — what's gone wrong so far, because hooks have already caused a real eight-figure loss in production.

A note on scope: Everything in this article describing frfr.fun's own graduation mechanics, fee routing, or hook integrations is an illustrative design pattern, not a confirmed frfr.fun product feature. Where frfr.fun's actual, documented behavior is referenced (USDC-denominated fair launches, bonding-curve graduation to DEX liquidity on Base), that's noted as the platform's own self-description rather than an independently verified fact.

1. Why Uniswap V4 Changes the Math

In Uniswap v1 through v3, every trading pair got its own standalone contract, deployed fresh through a factory pattern. That meant real gas costs for every new pool and extra overhead any time a swap had to route through more than one pool.

V4 replaces that with a singleton architecture: a single contract, PoolManager.sol, holds the state for every pool on the network. Creating a pool becomes a state update inside that contract instead of a full contract deployment. Independent estimates from Uniswap Labs and multiple security firms put the resulting gas savings for pool creation at roughly 99% — commonly cited as dropping pool-creation costs from the $25–$200 range under V3 down to a few cents (Uniswap Labs, "Our Vision for Uniswap v4"; DEXTools, 2026; Zealynx Security, January 2026).

The singleton is paired with flash accounting, which uses Ethereum's transient storage (EIP-1153) to track net token balance changes ("deltas") across a whole transaction, settling only the final balances instead of transferring tokens after every intermediate step. This is what makes multi-hop swaps and chained actions (like swap-then-add-liquidity) meaningfully cheaper.

V4 shipped with a serious security track record behind it: nine independent audits, a $2.35 million public security competition with more than 500 participants, and a $15.5 million bug bounty — at the time, the largest in the industry — with no critical vulnerabilities found in either the competition or the bounty program before launch (Uniswap Labs, "Uniswap v4 is Here," January 2025). It launched simultaneously on 12 chains, including Ethereum mainnet, Base, Arbitrum, and Avalanche (Decrypt, January 31, 2025).

That security investment matters, because — as the risk section below covers — the core protocol being well-audited doesn't mean every hook built on top of it is.

2. How Hooks Actually Work

A hook is a smart contract that the PoolManager calls into at specific points in a pool's lifecycle. When a pool is created, its initialization parameters point to a hook address, and the permission bits encoded in that address tell PoolManager which callback functions to invoke.

Uniswap V4 defines 14 distinct hook permission flags:

Lifecycle Phase Available Callbacks Typical Use Cases Initialization beforeInitialize, afterInitialize Setting initial dynamic fee tiers, registering oracles Liquidity operations beforeAddLiquidity, afterAddLiquidity, beforeRemoveLiquidity, afterRemoveLiquidity Liquidity lockups, anti-JIT protection, LP reward tracking Swapping beforeSwap, afterSwap Dynamic fee adjustment, transaction caps, MEV mitigation, auto-burns Donations beforeDonate, afterDonate Distributing yield directly to active LPs Return-delta variants beforeSwapReturnDelta, afterSwapReturnDelta, afterAddLiquidityReturnDelta, afterRemoveLiquidityReturnDelta Custom accounting — hooks that take direct control of settlement amounts

A swap's control flow looks like this:

User Swap Request
      └──► PoolManager.sol
              ├──► Trigger beforeSwap() in the pool's Hook contract
              ├──► Execute core AMM swap math
              └──► Trigger afterSwap() in the pool's Hook contract

Because the hook's permissions are encoded directly into its contract address (via bitmask), PoolManager can check what a hook is allowed to do without extra state lookups — which is also why deploying a hook requires CREATE2 address mining: you need a salt value that produces a contract address whose low-order bits match your intended permission set. Uniswap Foundation provides an official tool for this, HookMiner, distributed with the v4-periphery repository (KuCoin, 2026; GitHub, Uniswap/v4-periphery).

# Example: mining a V4 hook address via Foundry
cast create2 \
  --starts-with 0x00 \
  --caller <DEPLOYER_ADDRESS> \
  --bytecode <HOOK_BYTECODE>

3. What Graduation-to-Hook Could Look Like

Bonding-curve launchpads share a common shape: a creator launches a token, buyers move along a deterministic price curve, and once the curve hits its funding target, the token "graduates" — the raised capital and remaining supply move into an AMM pool, and LP ownership is typically burned or locked. frfr.fun describes its own process this way: fair-launch, USDC-settled bonding curves on Base, graduating into Aerodrome or Uniswap V4 liquidity. That description comes from frfr.fun itself and should be read as the platform's self-reported mechanics rather than an independently audited claim.

Illustrative pipeline — for a launchpad choosing to route graduation liquidity into a hook-enabled V4 pool rather than a static fee-tier pool:

┌────────────────────────────────┐
│   Bonding Curve (pre-graduation)│
└───────────────┬────────────────┘
                │ Funding target reached
                ▼
┌────────────────────────────────┐
│   Migration Router (illustrative)│
└───────────────┬────────────────┘
                │ Calls PoolManager.initialize() with a hook address
                ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              Uniswap V4 PoolManager.sol                 │
│  [Graduated Token Pool] ◄───► [Hook Contract]            │
│                                   ├── Dynamic fee logic  │
│                                   ├── Trade-size limits  │
│                                   └── Buyback routing    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

This is a design pattern, not a description of any specific launchpad's live infrastructure. Whether frfr.fun or any comparable platform actually routes graduation liquidity this way is a platform-specific implementation decision that should be verified against that platform's own audited contracts before anyone treats it as fact.

4. This Isn't Hypothetical — What's Already Live on Base

The strongest case for this architecture isn't the code samples below — it's that Base already has a working precedent, launched the same week as V4 itself.

Flaunch, a memecoin launchpad built natively on Base, was among the first projects to build directly on V4 hooks. Its mechanics (Blockworks, February 2025; Bankless, February 2025; Flaunch whitepaper, docs.flaunch.gg):

Fixed-price fair launch: new tokens sell at one fixed price for a 30-minute window before the pool opens to market pricing, implemented via a hook that restricts liquidity dynamics during that period.
Progressive Bid Wall (PBW): a hook-based mechanism that accumulates ETH from trading fees and places it as a standing buy order one tick below spot price, creating a self-funded price floor that grows as trading volume grows.
Internal Swap Pool (ISP): a fee-conversion hook that converts collected meme-token fees into ETH without creating additional sell pressure on the token itself.
Creator-controlled fee split: creators choose what percentage of trading fees go to themselves versus the community buyback pool, a decision that's locked at launch and can't be changed afterward.

In its first week live, Flaunch had launched roughly 2,135 tokens, generated about $75.6 million in V4 trading volume, and paid out 51 ETH to creators and communities (Blockworks, February 3, 2025) — figures that reflect a launch-week snapshot rather than a steady-state benchmark, but which demonstrate the mechanism works at real volume, not just in a testnet demo.

Flaunch isn't alone. Other production hook projects on Base and elsewhere include:

Bunni — a "rehypothecation hook" that routes idle LP capital into lending protocols to stack yield on top of swap fees. Uniswap's own interface began routing liquidity through Bunni's V4 hook in June 2025 (CoinMarketCap AI research digest, 2026).
Doppler (Whetstone Research) — a liquidity-bootstrapping protocol that builds Dutch-auction-style token launches directly on V4 hook infrastructure.
Angstrom (Sorella Labs) — a hook-based DEX design aimed at reducing MEV leakage to L2 sequencers by restricting swap execution to staked validators.
Clanker — another Base-native memecoin launchpad using hooks for automated fee management and MEV-mitigation modules.

According to hook-analytics tracker HookRank.io, dozens of hooks were deployed within V4's first weeks live, with the large majority of early hook-attributable TVL concentrated in Flaunch's contracts (Blockworks, February 2025). This is a young, fast-moving ecosystem — treat any specific adoption number as a snapshot rather than a stable baseline.

5. Two Illustrative Hook Patterns

The two patterns below are simplified teaching examples, adapted from common public hook designs, not audited production code. Given the hook-specific exploits covered in Section 7, treat this as a starting point for a security review, not something to deploy as-is.

Pattern A — Dynamic Volatility Fee

A fixed swap fee charges the same rate in calm markets and during a coordinated dump. A dynamic fee hook adjusts the fee based on recent trading intensity — low during organic trading, higher when it detects a burst of same-block activity that looks like coordinated extraction.

// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity ^0.8.24;

import {BaseHook} from "v4-periphery/src/base/hooks/BaseHook.sol";
import {IPoolManager} from "v4-core/src/interfaces/IPoolManager.sol";
import {Hooks} from "v4-core/src/libraries/Hooks.sol";
import {PoolKey} from "v4-core/src/types/PoolKey.sol";
import {BeforeSwapDelta, BeforeSwapDeltaLibrary} from "v4-core/src/types/BeforeSwapDelta.sol";
import {LPFeeLibrary} from "v4-core/src/libraries/LPFeeLibrary.sol";

contract DynamicVolatilityHook is BaseHook {
    using LPFeeLibrary for uint24;

    uint256 public lastSwapBlock;
    uint256 public swapCountInBlock;

    // Fee units are hundredths of a basis point (1,000,000 = 100%)
    uint24 constant BASE_FEE = 1000;      // 0.10%
    uint24 constant HIGH_VOL_FEE = 30000; // 3.00%

    constructor(IPoolManager _poolManager) BaseHook(_poolManager) {}

    function getHookPermissions() public pure override returns (Hooks.Permissions memory) {
        return Hooks.Permissions({
            beforeInitialize: false,
            afterInitialize: false,
            beforeAddLiquidity: false,
            afterAddLiquidity: false,
            beforeRemoveLiquidity: false,
            afterRemoveLiquidity: false,
            beforeSwap: true,
            afterSwap: true,
            beforeDonate: false,
            afterDonate: false,
            beforeSwapReturnDelta: false,
            afterSwapReturnDelta: false,
            afterAddLiquidityReturnDelta: false,
            afterRemoveLiquidityReturnDelta: false
        });
    }

    function beforeSwap(
        address,
        PoolKey calldata key,
        IPoolManager.SwapParams calldata,
        bytes calldata
    ) external override returns (bytes4, BeforeSwapDelta, uint24) {

        uint24 currentFee = BASE_FEE;

        if (block.number == lastSwapBlock) {
            swapCountInBlock++;
            if (swapCountInBlock > 3) {
                currentFee = HIGH_VOL_FEE;
            }
        } else {
            lastSwapBlock = block.number;
            swapCountInBlock = 1;
        }

        return (
            BaseHook.beforeSwap.selector,
            BeforeSwapDeltaLibrary.ZERO_DELTA,
            currentFee | LPFeeLibrary.OVERRIDE_FEE_FLAG
        );
    }
}

Same-block swap counting is a crude volatility proxy — it's easy to explain, but a real deployment would want a more robust signal (e.g., a short TWAP deviation check) to avoid both false positives (penalizing organic bursts of retail buying) and false negatives (missing volatility spread across a few blocks).

Pattern B — Anti-Whale / Max Trade Size

Newly graduated tokens are frequent sniping targets: a wallet or bot buys a large share of available liquidity in the first blocks after launch, then controls price discovery from there. A max-trade-size hook rejects any single swap above a defined threshold.

// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity ^0.8.24;

import {BaseHook} from "v4-periphery/src/base/hooks/BaseHook.sol";
import {IPoolManager} from "v4-core/src/interfaces/IPoolManager.sol";
import {Hooks} from "v4-core/src/libraries/Hooks.sol";
import {PoolKey} from "v4-core/src/types/PoolKey.sol";
import {BeforeSwapDelta, BeforeSwapDeltaLibrary} from "v4-core/src/types/BeforeSwapDelta.sol";

contract AntiWhaleHook is BaseHook {

    error MaxTradeExceeded();

    uint256 public maxSwapThreshold = 1000 ether;

    constructor(IPoolManager _poolManager) BaseHook(_poolManager) {}

    function getHookPermissions() public pure override returns (Hooks.Permissions memory) {
        return Hooks.Permissions({
            beforeInitialize: false,
            afterInitialize: false,
            beforeAddLiquidity: false,
            afterAddLiquidity: false,
            beforeRemoveLiquidity: false,
            afterRemoveLiquidity: false,
            beforeSwap: true,
            afterSwap: false,
            beforeDonate: false,
            afterDonate: false,
            beforeSwapReturnDelta: false,
            afterSwapReturnDelta: false,
            afterAddLiquidityReturnDelta: false,
            afterRemoveLiquidityReturnDelta: false
        });
    }

    function beforeSwap(
        address,
        PoolKey calldata,
        IPoolManager.SwapParams calldata params,
        bytes calldata
    ) external view override returns (bytes4, BeforeSwapDelta, uint24) {

        uint256 swapAmount = params.amountSpecified < 0
            ? uint256(-params.amountSpecified)
            : uint256(params.amountSpecified);

        if (swapAmount > maxSwapThreshold) {
            revert MaxTradeExceeded();
        }

        return (
            BaseHook.beforeSwap.selector,
            BeforeSwapDeltaLibrary.ZERO_DELTA,
            0
        );
    }
}

A hard cap like this is blunt — it also blocks legitimate large buyers and can be worked around with multiple wallets. Production anti-sniping designs (like Flaunch's fixed-price fair-launch window, above) tend to favor time-boxed price stability over hard transaction caps.

6. Deployment Steps, in Practice

Write and test the hook. Use the v4-periphery BaseHook scaffold. Every function that touches state should assume it will be called adversarially.
Mine the hook address. Use HookMiner (or cast create2 directly) to find a salt whose deployed address encodes exactly the permission bits your hook needs — no more, no less. Encoding a permission your hook doesn't correctly implement is a documented cause of denial-of-service failures (KuCoin, 2026).
Get an independent audit before mainnet. This is not optional given the track record in Section 7 — see the access-control failure that cost Cork Protocol $11 million despite the core V4 protocol being extensively audited.
Initialize the pool with the hook address, whether that's through a launchpad's automated graduation router or a manual PoolManager.initialize() call.
Verify the hook contract on BaseScan and, ideally, submit it to a public hook registry (like HookRank) so holders and integrators can independently review it.

7. The Part the Original Playbook Skipped: Hook Security Is Its Own Attack Surface

V4's core contracts have an unusually strong audit history. That does not extend to hooks built on top of them — each hook is, in the words of one security firm, "an independent trust domain" (KuCoin, 2026), and the hook ecosystem already has real losses to show for it:

Cork Protocol — $11 million, May 28, 2025. A depeg-insurance protocol built on a custom V4 hook was drained after an attacker exploited missing access control in the hook's callback functions, tricking the protocol into crediting the attacker with derivative tokens it never deposited collateral for. The root cause was a missing onlyPoolManager-style modifier on a hook function that should never have been callable by an arbitrary address (Dedaub, May 30, 2025).
z0r0z V4 Router — roughly $42,000, March 2026. A smaller but illustrative failure: an inline-assembly routine trusted a fixed calldata offset that turned out not to be fixed, letting an attacker manipulate router behavior (DEV Community security writeup, March 18, 2026).
Independent research has found this is not a one-off problem. A widely cited threat-modeling paper, "Thorns in the Rose: Exploring Security Risks in Uniswap v4's Novel Hook Mechanism," examined a public hooks repository and found that roughly 36% of the hooks sampled at one commit hash carried patterns that could be vulnerable to known attack classes (cited via GitHub's awesome-uniswap-hooks list; Cyfrin, November 2025).

Common vulnerability classes documented by multiple audit firms (Hacken, Cyfrin, CertiK, QuillAudits) include: missing PoolManager-only access control on callback functions; unbounded loops in fee-distribution logic that can be griefed into permanent reverts; incorrect delta/accounting math that lets attackers drain funds through rounding; and "async" hooks that take direct custody of funds, which concentrates risk in a single contract's correctness.

The practical takeaway for a launchpad considering hook-enabled graduation: the security question isn't "is Uniswap V4 safe" — it almost certainly is, given its audit and bounty history — it's "is this specific hook safe," and that requires its own independent review every time.

MEV context, for scale

Part of the pitch for hooks is MEV mitigation. It's worth sizing the problem they're addressing. EigenPhi data covering November 2024 through October 2025 recorded roughly 95,000 sandwich attacks on Ethereum mainnet, extracting an estimated $60 million from traders over that period — though monthly extraction fell sharply over the same window, from roughly $10 million per month in late 2024 to about $2.5 million by October 2025, as more trading volume moved to MEV-protected routing (Lightspark, citing EigenPhi data). That decline is itself evidence that protective infrastructure — private RPCs, batch auctions, and yes, hook-based protections — is having a measurable effect, not just a theoretical one. We were not able to find Base-specific (as opposed to Ethereum L1) sandwich-attack figures at the same level of rigor; Base's sequencer-based transaction ordering changes the mechanics of MEV extraction relative to Ethereum's public mempool, and that difference deserves its own dedicated analysis rather than a borrowed L1 statistic.

8. Regulatory Context for Fee-Routing and Buyback Hooks (as of July 2026)

Any hook that automates fee collection, buybacks, or burns is, functionally, a piece of tokenomics — and tokenomics is exactly what U.S. regulators have been actively rewriting rules around this year. None of the following is legal advice; it's context a creator or their counsel should be aware of before shipping fee-routing logic that behaves like automated market-making revenue distribution.

The SEC-CFTC joint interpretation (March 17, 2026) established a binding five-category token taxonomy — digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins, and digital securities — with only the last category treated as a security outright (Ballard Spahr; Jenner & Block; Willkie Farr & Gallagher, all March–May 2026 client alerts). Critically, the interpretation confirms that a token can become subject to securities treatment if it's sold alongside ongoing "essential managerial efforts" or public promises about performance — which is directly relevant to a hook-based buyback or fee-split mechanism that a creator actively markets as generating returns for holders.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act is not law yet. It passed the House on July 17, 2025 (294–134), and the Senate Banking Committee advanced its own version 15–9 on May 14, 2026 — but as of the most recent reporting (early July 2026), it remains stalled in the Senate with no floor vote scheduled, still requiring reconciliation with the Senate Agriculture Committee's companion bill and the House-passed text before it could become law (FinTech Weekly; Yahoo Finance, July 2026). Treat any claim that U.S. market-structure legislation has already passed as premature.
The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, governs payment stablecoins — relevant background for a USDC-denominated platform, since it shapes how qualifying stablecoin issuers are treated under the SEC/CFTC taxonomy above. Implementing rulemaking has a deadline in mid-to-late 2026.

None of this prohibits hook-based fee automation. It does mean that a hook which markets itself around "holder returns" or "automated yield" is stepping closer to the kind of managerial-effort-plus-profit-expectation analysis regulators are actively refining right now, and that's worth a specific legal review rather than an assumption that "it's just smart contract code, not a security."

9. Why This Matters for Creators and LPs

Stripped of the buzzwords, hooks let a launchpad make three structural improvements over a static-fee pool:

Fee logic moves out of the token contract and into the pool. Traditional "tax tokens" bake buy/sell fees into transferFrom, which raises gas costs on every transfer and breaks compatibility with a lot of standard DeFi tooling. A hook collects fees at the pool level instead, leaving the ERC-20 contract itself standard and composable.
MEV mitigation becomes a pool-level design choice, not an afterthought. Whether that's Flaunch's fixed-price fair-launch window, a dynamic fee that penalizes clustered same-block activity, or Angstrom's validator-restricted swap model, the point is the same: liquidity behavior can now react to conditions in real time instead of being fixed at pool creation.
LP incentive design is programmable. Instead of routing LP tokens to an external farming contract, a hook can track positions and distribute rewards directly inside the pool via afterAddLiquidity/afterRemoveLiquidity.

None of that is risk-free, as Section 7 makes clear — but it's a real, already-shipping category of infrastructure on Base, not a speculative roadmap item.

Sources

Uniswap Labs, "Our Vision for Uniswap v4," blog.uniswap.org
Uniswap Labs, "Uniswap v4 is Here," blog.uniswap.org, January 2025
Decrypt, "Uniswap V4 DeFi Protocol Launches on Ethereum and Beyond," January 31, 2025
Blockworks, "Uniswap v4 is live on 12 chains," February 3, 2025
Bankless, "How to Launch Better Memecoins on Flaunch," February 4, 2025
Flaunch Whitepaper, docs.flaunch.gg, 2025
Dedaub, "The $11M Cork Protocol Hack," May 30, 2025
DEV Community, "Uniswap V4 Hook Security: 7 Attack Vectors That Already Cost DeFi $11M," March 18, 2026
Cyfrin, "Uniswap v4 Hooks Security Deep Dive," November 2025
KuCoin, "Uniswap v4 Hook Security: Architecture, Common Vulnerabilities, and Best Practices," 2026
Zealynx Security, "Uniswap v4 Security Guide," January 2026
Lightspark, "The Stablecoin Sandwich: How MEV Exploits Target Digital Dollar Swaps"
Ballard Spahr, Jenner & Block, Willkie Farr & Gallagher — SEC/CFTC joint interpretation client alerts, March–May 2026
FinTech Weekly; Yahoo Finance — CLARITY Act status reporting, 2026

Corrections and Transparency Log

Fixed non-compiling Solidity in the original draft. uint24 CONSTANT BASE_FEE (invalid capitalization) corrected to uint24 constant BASE_FEE in both code samples.
Removed unverifiable/generic claims about frfr.fun's graduation pipeline and relabeled the migration-to-hook diagram as an illustrative design pattern rather than a description of a confirmed frfr.fun feature, per this newsletter's standing editorial policy on platform-specific claims.
Replaced hypothetical "creators can leverage" framing with real, sourced case studies — Flaunch, Bunni, Doppler, Angstrom, and Clanker are all live, shipping V4 hook projects on Base, not illustrative examples, and are cited accordingly.
Added a dedicated hook-security section (Section 7) that was entirely absent from the original draft. The original presented hooks as a strict security upgrade over static pools; the record shows hook-specific vulnerabilities have already caused a documented $11M loss (Cork Protocol, May 2025), independent of the well-audited V4 core.
Verified the 99% gas-reduction and 14-permission-flag claims from the original draft against Uniswap Labs' own materials and multiple independent security-firm writeups; both held up and are now sourced inline.
Corrected the regulatory framing to reflect actual, current U.S. legislative status as of July 2026: the CLARITY Act has passed the House but has not passed the Senate or been signed into law; this replaces any implied assumption that comprehensive federal market-structure legislation is already in force.
Flagged the absence of Base-specific MEV/sandwich-attack data. The MEV statistics available and cited here are Ethereum-mainnet figures (EigenPhi/Lightspark); no comparably rigorous Base-specific figures were found, and the article says so explicitly rather than implying L1 numbers transfer directly to an L2 sequencer model.
All dollar-volume and adoption figures for Flaunch and comparable projects are explicitly labeled as launch-week or point-in-time snapshots, not steady-state metrics, since that's what the underlying sources report.