Uniswap Hook narrative recreates wealth opportunities, how to seize the next one?

If no one in your group is discussing $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks, you might need to change groups.

The mint price of Slonks when it launched was less than 0.004 ETH, equivalent to less than 70 RMB. Six days later, the floor price rose to 0.123 ETH, an increase of 60 times. The unit price of uPEG was $982, and it took two weeks to go from 0 to a market cap of $34.44 million. When the market cap of SATO fell below $3 million, someone directly bottomed out through the on-chain bonding curve, opening a position of 260,000 SATO. The market cap later surged to $40 million, quickly yielding a profit of $360,000.

These are not ordinary memecoin get-rich-quick stories. They point to a common track: Uniswap V4 Hook. In just two and a half weeks, these three projects pulled the entire V4 hook track from being "an internal toy for DeFi geeks" into the mainstream spotlight.

Related reading: “In a Bull Market, Will the 'Hook' Concept Become the Track to Open the Bull Market?”

For retail investors who did not get in early on $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks, how can we seize the next potential opportunity for wealth? Before discussing this, we need to briefly review how the V4 Hook narrative gained traction.

How Did the V4 Hook Narrative Gain Traction?

In the world before V3, Uniswap was a money exchange counter. You exchanged ETH for USDC, with prices following x*y=k, and that was it. After V4, the hook was integrated into the swap lifecycle, allowing anyone to insert their own code before or after a swap, or at the moment of adding liquidity.

In fact, Uniswap v4 was launched as early as January 30 of last year. However, it was not until the recent emergence of projects like $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks that the hook gained widespread discussion among retail players.

SATO was the first to launch among the three, going live around mid-April, about a week earlier than uPEG. However, it did not have KOLs to ignite interest, nor did it have heavyweight figures like Adam Hollander to endorse it. Its dissemination path was more aligned with the degen circle. Keywords like "pure on-chain," "fair launch," "no team allocation," and "the contract runs itself" directly attracted V4 geeks and bonding curve veterans.

The real explosive point of the V4 Hook narrative lies in Unipeg (UPEG), and the name "Unipeg" carries strong commemorative significance for Uniswap, giving it an inherent narrative and attention from the start.

In 2019, Hayden Adams published a blog titled “Uniswap Birthday Blog---V0,” where he recalled that when naming the Uniswap protocol, he originally wanted to call it "Unipeg," meaning a combination of unicorn and Pegasus. But Vitalik glanced at it and said, "Unipeg? That sounds more like Uniswap." So Hayden settled on the name Uniswap.

"Uniswap" replaced "Unipeg," becoming the name of a $70 billion DeFi blue-chip.

Eight years later, in April 2026, an anonymous developer (Twitter account @unipegv4, rumored to be related to the 0xHadrian blog) picked up this discarded name and gave it new meaning: Uni + JPEG = uPEG. The NFT circle has long referred to images as "JPEG," and since this thing was born in the Uniswap pool, it is Uniswap's JPEG.

This story itself is viral material. It combines Hayden's personal anecdotes, Vitalik's quips, NFT circle jargon, and the new mechanism of V4, all encapsulated in one name.

The story of "uPEG" is very easy to tell and spread. It attracted OpenSea CMO Adam Hollander, who tweeted on April 25, expressing interest in the concept and suggesting he would buy a little to try it out.

That night, "uPEG" tripled in value, followed by Uniswap team member niko, Ouroboros co-founder Nafay, and meme coin KOL pow all sharing their uPEG holdings on X platform. Within two weeks, uPEG surged from 0 to a market cap of $34.44 million, with a unit price of $982.

Related reading: “What Magic Does the New Image Gold Dog Unipeg Have as Its Market Cap Surpasses $23 Million?“

meme coin KOL pow promotes uPEG

Following uPEG, "Slonks" launched on May 1.

Developer Hirsch did something that sounds quite contradictory: he directly embedded an AI image generation model (only 214KB, about the size of a low-resolution mobile wallpaper) into an Ethereum smart contract. The model's task was to replicate 10,000 CryptoPunks.

However, the 214KB model cannot remember 10,000 faces. Each image has 576 pixels, and on average, the model makes about 24 mistakes, resulting in a distortion rate of about 4%. Out of the 10,000 images, only 32 were perfectly replicated, while the rest were all "deformed punks."

slop image example

Hirsch referred to these misdrawn pixels as slop. He then wrote on Twitter about the project's attitude: "The slop is not a bug. It is the medium."

The entire economic model is based on "the more mistakes, the more valuable." Two Slonks of the same level can merge, burn one to upgrade the other, and the slop of the new image only increases. Any Slonk can be sent to the void, minting future $SLOP tokens (which have not yet been officially released) at a 1:1 ratio based on the amount of slop. Every action is completed through the V4 hook, verifiable on-chain.

Slonks did not catch fire immediately upon launch; in the first few days, it was almost overlooked amid the spotlight of uPEG's $30 million market cap. The floor price hovered around 0.005 ETH, and there was little discussion on OpenSea until the NFT veterans from the 798 group started tweeting about it on X, turning "mistakes are art" into a meme that could be shared. Meanwhile, further capturing by smart money on-chain, KOLs and media promotions, along with trending on OpenSea's homepage, helped Slonks increase 60 times in five days.

In summary:

• The significance of SATO lies in its underlying proof that "V4 hook can create new economic models." This was the premise for the later emergence of uPEG and Slonks.

• The significance of uPEG is that it translated the DeFi concept of V4 hook to the NFT circle. Retail investors suddenly realized that the hook is not just a toy for DeFi geeks; it can create things they also want to buy.

• Slonks created a stronger story hook and an interesting economic model on the attention dividend generated by uPEG, further pushing the V4 Hook narrative.

What Should We Focus on to Seize the Next Opportunity?

For the core circle of V4 Hook abroad, the Rhythm editor mainly recommends the following users:

1. Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams), founder of Uniswap, whose importance goes without saying.

2. saucepoint (@saucepoint), the hook godfather of the Uniswap Foundation, author of v4-template, from which almost all hook projects derive their initial code.

3. Uniswap Official (@Uniswap) and Uniswap Foundation (@UniswapFND), the Builder Update released every Wednesday or Thursday is the most important official signal source for the track.

4. niko (@niko_eth), a member of the Uniswap Labs team, who can be said to be a key player in the first wave of KOL relay for uPEG.

5. horsefacts (@horsefacts_eth), one of the earliest builders of V4 hook, a technical trendsetter.

6. Adam Hollander (@AdamHollander), CMO of OpenSea, with a deeper background as an early ecosystem promoter for Hashmasks and Pudgy Penguins, is a key messenger in this wave crossing from the DeFi circle to the NFT circle.

7. Project accounts: uPEG Official (@unipegv4), Unimon Official (@unimonapp), Slonks Official account, SATO Official (@Satothedog). Observing who they follow and interact with often leads to discovering the next hook project that hasn't been named yet.

In addition, we can also pay attention to some websites related to V4 hook and Uniswap:

1. HookRank.io is currently the cleanest V4 hook explorer, listing over 1300 hooks, ranked by TVL/Volume/Fees, with "New" and "Trending" tags. This is the first stop to see hooks that haven't been mentioned on Twitter but have already gained traction.

2. HookAtlas.com is a directory of hook projects with project descriptions, suitable for mapping.

3. Uniswap Foundation Builder Update on the blog is released every Wednesday or Thursday by the foundation, and any core user following the Uniswap ecosystem will not miss the hottest narratives.

   The latest Blog also mentioned community news like "Hooks, Unipeg"

4. Unichain Infinite Hackathon competition, where award-winning projects are almost all seeds, allowing us to keep an eye on core projects on Unichain.

5. Dune Uniswap V4 Tracker, to see the total number of hooks, TVL distribution, and chain volume distribution.

6. Dexscreener needs no introduction, a commonly used K-line website for trading coins, useful for monitoring newly created V4 pairs, serving as an early signal source for projects that have not been ignited by KOLs. For example, the holding addresses for uPEG jumped from 200 to over 4000 within 24 hours; this slope itself is a signal.

7. OpenSea + Magic Eden's Trending lists, Slonks appeared on OpenSea Trending the day after its launch, while ordinary NFT projects typically take weeks of marketing to achieve this. Meanwhile, on May 8, Slonks had a single-day trading volume of 575 ETH, surpassing CryptoPunks' 129 ETH; any new project with a single-day trading volume exceeding that of CryptoPunks during the same period is a signal of track-level significance.

8. The awesome-uniswap-hooks GitHub project, which registers all hook experimental projects, is suitable for discovering early projects that are "design-wise interesting" but do not yet have tokens.

The Next Phase of the V4 Hook Narrative

Based on the unscientific speculation of this Rhythm editor, if the V4 Hook narrative is not going to stop immediately, the next wave of narratives will likely follow three lines: short-term is the bug fix for SATO, mid-term is the composability of hooks, and long-term is Unichain becoming the center of the entire track.

First, the short-term bug fix for SATO, which can be seen in various group chats today.

The reason SATO has a "fix" like sat1 lies in its hook contract. Any V4 hook that wants to replace Uniswap's standard pricing must maintain its own account of "how much money is in the pool" to calculate its curve formula. However, the Uniswap PoolManager also maintains a real account. With two sets of accounts existing simultaneously, each swap must synchronize once. If the synchronization logic is not tightly written, the two numbers will diverge, a phenomenon known in the hook engineering circle as dual-state drift.

Drift creates arbitrage opportunities. At a certain moment, the hook internally believes that 1 SATO should be worth X ETH, but the actual pool reserves show Y ETH; whoever discovers the difference first can take advantage. The two addresses that made a profit of $360,000 were not exploiting market sentiment but rather a flaw in the contract's accounting.

sat1 packages itself as "one curve, single state," using only one set of accounts, eliminating drift. The engineering fix is reasonable, but the narrative is insidious—it tells retail investors, "SATO has a bug; I am the correct version," aiming to seize legitimacy.

This approach is not unique to V4. The Bitcoin ecosystem has ORDI, SATS, 1000SATS, the ERC-404 era had Pandora, DN404, ERC-404 V2, and the pump.fun era had BankrFun, ClankerFun; every newcomer claims to have "fixed the previous issue."

The essence of a bug fix narrative is not technical repair but narrative plunder. It does not need to actually fix anything; it only needs to make "the original version has a bug" a consensus on Twitter, and liquidity will shift from the original to the new version.

V4 hook has lowered the cost of this script to unprecedented lows; hooks are open-source, and forking a copy and changing three lines of code allows for deployment. Every successful hook project comes with a clone generator. SATO/sat1 is the first pair of templates, and uPEG2, Slinks will inevitably follow.

In the mid-term, we can look forward to the composability of hooks.

Currently, a V4 pool can only host one hook. However, some are already working on "meta-hooks," where one hook internally calls multiple sub-hooks to achieve composable behavior.

Once this is operational, it means that uPEG's image generation + Slonks' NFT-token exchange + SATO's bonding curve can all exist simultaneously in the same pool. You swap once, triggering image generation, rewriting the pricing curve, and minting NFTs.

There are many directions to push forward: swap triggering music or audio generation (changing SVG to MIDI, as audio is easier to spread than images); swap as an identity or reputation system (updating soul-bound points with each swap); prediction market hooks (treating swaps as betting actions, running a Polymarket model in LP); time-based hooks (the longer you hold, the lower the sell tax); cross-collection fusion gameplay (using hooks to merge Pudgy Penguins and Azuki into new forms, most feasible among CC0 projects).

Rhythm BlockBeats editor believes that composability is the true ceiling of this track, while single-point mechanisms are merely demos.

Looking further into the long term, Unichain may become the next hot chain.

Not because of its technical superiority, but because it has the funding, traffic, and whitelist bias from the Uniswap Foundation. Hook projects on Unichain have a probability of exposure in the official Builder Update that is an order of magnitude higher than on the Ethereum mainnet.

If you want to catch the earliest signals, Rhythm BlockBeats editor also suggests setting up a separate monitoring for Unichain: check the hook deployment numbers on the Dune Unichain dashboard, TVL and active addresses on L2Beat, and new tool updates on the official builder toolkit, etc.

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