Plain-language explainers for AMMs, liquidity providers, hooks, and onchain markets.
Short, checkable answers to common questions about onchain markets, written from Hookr’s deployed contracts and release-gated product records. Each explainer separates current, retained, deployed-but-not-usable, and designed state, then links the product surface where readers can verify the boundary.
Last reviewed August 23, 2026 · hookr.fun/learn · 23 Sep 2026
An automated market maker (AMM) is a smart contract that lets traders swap tokens against a liquidity pool instead of against another party’s order: prices come from a formula applied to the pool’s reserves, so trading works at any time without a counterparty being online.
A liquidity provider (LP) is anyone who deposits tokens into a pool so other people can trade against them; in return the pool pays them a share of its swap fees, pro rata to the liquidity they contributed while it was actually used.
A Uniswap v4 hook is a smart contract attached to a specific pool that runs code at defined points in the pool’s own operations — before and after swaps, liquidity changes, and donations — letting a pool carry custom rules like dynamic fees, trade caps, or automatic burns with no off-chain infrastructure operating them.
A bonding curve is a pricing rule that sets a token’s price from its own supply: buyers purchase along a predefined curve, so each purchase moves the price up by an amount the curve fixes in advance, and the collected funds back the market until it graduates into open trading.
A token launchpad is a product that creates new tokens together with their initial market: it standardizes supply, distribution, pricing, and opening trading rules so a launch follows known mechanics instead of ad-hoc arrangements made fresh for every project.
Hookr’s zero-seed Instant Launch opens a Uniswap v4 pool without taking seed funds or a token allocation from the creator: the fixed supply goes into one locked token-only sell position at the platform’s disclosed opening valuation, and buyers provide the quote asset as trading begins.
A Continuous Clearing Auction is an onchain token sale that releases supply across a fixed window and computes one clearing price per block from active bids, so accepted bidders in the same block receive the same price while demand can move later clearing blocks higher.
Reading an onchain market means answering four questions from chain data: what am I trading (the contract address plus its chain), what rules does its market enforce (pool, hook, and fee parameters), how deep is it (in-range liquidity relative to trade size), and what has actually happened (settled trades and receipts) — checked at a pinned block rather than taken from a dashboard’s word.