# 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.

- Source: https://defiloops.com/blog/moving-a-levered-range-means-burning-it-first
- Published: 2026-09-16
- Category: Architecture
- Tags: uniswap, leverage, rebalancing, liquidity
- Author: DeFiLoops

---
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.

<Steps>
  <Step title="Flash the repayment from Morpho">
    Which lends it for nothing.
  </Step>
  <Step title="Repay the vault so the old position is free">
    The debt is what was pinning it.
  </Step>
  <Step title="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.
  </Step>
  <Step title="Borrow against the new position and repay the flash">
    The stack is rebuilt, one range over.
  </Step>
</Steps>

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.

<Callout type="note" title="Ticks must be spacing multiples, and the new range must be valid">
  The upper tick has to sit above the lower one, and both have to be multiples of the pool's
  spacing. This is enforced by Uniswap itself rather than by us, and it is the same rule that
  makes [splitting a range at the midpoint](/blog/splitting-a-range-down-the-middle-was-always-wrong)
  impossible for some positions.
</Callout>

## 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.

<Callout type="warn" title="Recentring has a consequence for what comes next">
  Repositioning around the current price leaves a range one spacing wide. That range cannot
  subsequently be split, because no tick lies strictly inside it. Worth knowing before you plan
  a split after a recentre.
</Callout>

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.