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.
In short: the price has moved out of range, outside the window where your position earns fees, so it earns nothing, and you have borrowed against it. Moving a range means closing it and opening a new one, and with debt on it, the loan has to be cleared first. Here that is done in one transaction with a flash loan from Morpho, money borrowed and paid back inside that same transaction at no fee, so either all of it happens or none of it does. Know the cost first: closing settles at the current price, so you lock in whatever the move did to your mix of tokens.
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 in V3 the range is the position, with nothing separate to edit. 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.
- Flash the repayment from Morpho
Which lends it for nothing.
- Repay the vault so the old position is free
The debt is what was pinning it.
- 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.
- 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 while 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 only difference is intent: one is for adjusting a range you have chosen, the other for relocating it outright.
The cost that is easy to miss
Moving a range costs more than 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.