Turns out the easiest way to dodge a 3% token tax is to swim next door, where it's 1%.
On Robinhood Chain, five Uniswap v4 hook tokens traded $2.07B. Only $363M (17.5%) went through their official hooked pools, per Optimist data. The rest found copycat pools that skip the hook, so the fee meant to pay holders and fund buybacks never got charged. $3.42M collected. An estimated $16.2M skipped.
INDEX is the cautionary tale: a 3% hook, starved by a plain v3 pool charging 1%.
The fix just got merged into Uniswap's URC repo as URC-5, "Token Venue Policy." A token publishes its official pools and picks a mode. "Preferred" is a suggestion. "Enforced" tells routers to stay out of unofficial pools, and new tokens can block those venues outright.
Fine print: the spec says the mode "does not guarantee that the token can enforce" it onchain. A velvet rope with a polite sign.
Also, the first launchpad shipping URC-5 tokens belongs to the team that wrote it. Standards are easier to adopt when you're your own first customer.
Token Autopsy verdict: good plumbing, awkward confession. Routers should know where the official pool is. But 82.5% of volume walking out isn't a vampire attack. It's price discovery on your fee.
If your value capture only works when traders can't find the cheaper pool, is that a moat or a turnstile?
https://github.com/Uniswap/URCs/blob/main/URCs/urc-5.md