Monad Co-founder: The Uniswap Hooks Issue Raised by 0x First Originated from PropAMM and Can Only Be Solved with Fully On-Chain Order Routing

Odaily Report: Monad co-founder Keone Hon posted on X stating that 0x published an interesting yet critical article this morning exploring an emerging phenomenon that first appeared in PropAMM (proprietary AMM) and has now spread to Uniswap v4 Hooks.

In short, malicious market makers switch back and forth between "extremely narrow quotes" and "extremely wide quotes." They use extremely narrow quotes to attract aggregators into selecting that trading venue; however, once a user's trade is actually routed there, the quote immediately switches to an extremely wide spread. Slippage settings (i.e., limit protection) can protect some users—causing the trade to simply fail—but many users set slippage tolerance too high, and those users suffer extremely brutal "exploitation"—the article points out that certain Hooks maliciously switch back and forth between 0% and 18% fees.

A few months ago, Solana also published a very insightful article analyzing a similar phenomenon occurring on Solana aggregators, though the fee cap was around 1% rather than 18%. A few days later, they quietly took the article down.

The vision of an open system is to eliminate intermediaries and hidden fees. "Aggregator Spoofing" constitutes a massive hidden tax burden, and this problem can only be truly solved through fully-on-chain order routing. In turn, on-chain routing requires abundant computational power and flexible account access mechanisms—requiring both an extremely high-performance and efficient EVM and a well-designed on-chain routing protocol.

Earlier this morning, 0x posted stating that the number of malicious Uniswap v4 Hooks has increased significantly recently. Some Hooks offer attractive prices during the inquiry phase but change the execution price at actual settlement, thereby stealing funds from users through aggregators, wallets, and trading applications.