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Moving a levered range means burning it first

A Uniswap range cannot be edited, only replaced. Under leverage that means clearing the debt to burn it, and re-establishing the debt on the new one.

Architecture2 min readDeFiLoops

Price has walked out of your range. You are collecting nothing, and the position is now entirely one asset — the one that just did worse.

The fix is to move the range to where the price is. There is no operation in Uniswap V3 that does this, because a range is not a setting on a position. It is the position. Moving it means burning what you have and minting something else.

Which, under leverage, is blocked

Burning the position destroys the collateral. The vault will not allow that while the debt stands, and the debt cannot be cleared without money you have tied up in the position you are trying to burn.

So the sequence is: borrow the repayment for one transaction, clear the debt, burn the old range, mint the new one, re-establish the borrowing against it, repay the loan.

  1. Flash the repayment from Morpho

    Which lends it for nothing.

  2. Repay the vault so the old position is free

    The debt is what was pinning it.

  3. Burn the old range and mint the new one

    At the ticks you named. This is the only moment your liquidity is not in a pool.

  4. Borrow against the new position and repay the flash

    The stack is rebuilt, one range over.

Either all of that happens or none of it does. The manual version has a middle where your liquidity is out of the pool, your debt is repaid, and you are holding two loose tokens — a state in which the price you are trying to catch keeps moving.

Two operations, one difference

Rebalancing and repositioning follow the same path. Both take the new lower and upper ticks, both burn and remint inside the flash. The distinction is intent rather than mechanism: one is for adjusting a range you have chosen, the other for relocating it outright.

The cost nobody mentions

Moving a range is not free and it is not only gas. Burning and reminting settles your position at the pool’s current price, which means you crystallise whatever the range has done to your ratio. A range that price has left is a position that has already converted into the losing asset, and recentring it books that conversion.

The unwind minimums are required here for the same reason they are everywhere else in this family: the burn settles at whatever the pool’s price is at that instant, and those minimums are the only bound on it. A zero is refused on the chain.