Over Half of Uniswap v4 Hooks Found Malicious by 0x

0x recently published a report on Uniswap v4 hooks, revealing that only 19.4% of deployed hooks are safe, while 54.2% are malicious and another 26.4% likely malicious.

The analysis, which covered 84,163 hooks across six blockchain networks, found that many of the malicious hooks were designed to quote one price when an aggregator or router checked the rate, then settle the trade at a worse price, resulting in significant losses for users.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams pushed back against the report, arguing that permissionless systems like Uniswap's are inherently vulnerable to bad actors and that the existence of malicious hooks does not indicate a design flaw specific to v4.

Adams noted that Uniswap's API integrates only reviewed hooks, meaning users interacting through official interfaces should be shielded from the worst actors, but aggregators like 0x would need to implement more aggressive hook-verification pipelines to mitigate the risks.