Uniswap’s $9 Million Grant to Brevis Aims to Turbocharge V4 Adoption Through Trustless Rebates

The Uniswap Foundation has unveiled a bold new initiative to accelerate the adoption of its latest upgrade, Uniswap v4, awarding blockchain infrastructure firm Brevis a grant of up to $9 million. The funding will be used to develop atrustless gas rebate programdesigned to incentivize decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregators and routers that integrate Uniswap’s new “hooked pools.”

According to an official announcement, the Hooks Routing Rebate Program will leverage Brevis’s ZK Data Coprocessor and zkVM technologies to automate and verify gas rebates without centralized oversight. In practice, this means routers that successfully direct order flow through v4 hooked pools will receive automatic, cryptographically verified rewards.

The initiative represents a strategic push by the Uniswap Foundation to drive faster integration of v4 across the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. “These rebates provide routers new economic relief to experiment with v4 hooks,” the foundation noted, adding that recipients can choose to offset their operating costs, reduce user fees, or reinvest in liquidity.

Uniswap v4, launched earlier this year, introduced a sweeping redesign of the protocol’s infrastructure. Its most notable feature, hooks, allows developers to customize liquidity pools by embedding specific functions — such as dynamic fees, on-chain automation, or custom order execution. This modular approach turns Uniswap into an open development platform rather than a static exchange model.

The upgrade also introduced a singleton architecture, merging all pools into a single contract to reduce gas costs. According to Uniswap’s January blog post, creating new pools on v4 is “up to 99.99% cheaper” than in previous versions, while traders can expect significant gas savings during multi-hop swaps.

Yet, this innovation has come with new challenges. Aggregators like 1inch, 0x, and Velora, which combine liquidity across multiple decentralized exchanges, now face a steeper learning curve. Each hooked pool can behave differently depending on its design, meaning aggregators must adjust their routing algorithms for every unique configuration.

The Brevis program directly addresses this complexity. By rewarding routers that take the time and computational effort to integrate v4 hooks, the Uniswap Foundation hopes to accelerate ecosystem adoption while improving liquidity depth and trade efficiency.

This initiative also reflects Uniswap’s ongoing commitment to decentralization. Through the use of zero-knowledge proofs, the rebate system ensures that all calculations and reward distributions remain transparent, auditable, and tamper-proof — without relying on intermediaries.

At the time of writing, Uniswap’s native token (UNI) traded at $6.24, marking a modest gain of just over 1% in the past 24 hours. The grant underscores the protocol’s broader strategy: transforming Uniswap v4 into the most flexible, developer-driven DEX architecture in DeFi while ensuring that ecosystem participants — from liquidity providers to routers — have tangible economic incentives to join the upgrade.