Hook: Recreating the narrative to create opportunities for sudden wealth, how to seize the next one?

Author: Jaleel + Six, Cookie

If no one in your group is discussing $SATO, $uPEG , and Slonks, then you might need to find a different group.

When Slonks launched, the mint price was less than 0.004 ETH, equivalent to under 70 RMB, and six days later, the floor price rose to 0.123 ETH, a 60x increase. The unit price of uPEG was $982, reaching a market cap of $34.44 million in two weeks. When SATO’s market cap fell below $3 million, someone directly bought the dip on-chain via bonding curve, opening a position of 260k SATO, which later surged to a $40 million market cap, quickly realizing a profit of $360k.

These are not ordinary memecoin stories of getting rich overnight. They all point to a common track: Uniswap V4 Hook. In just two and a half weeks, these three projects brought the entire V4 hook track from “an internal toy for DeFi geeks” into mainstream view. Related reading: “Bull Market New Coin Frenzy, Will the ‘Hook’ Concept Become the Track to Start a Bull Market?”

For retail investors who missed the early opportunity to buy $SATO, $uPEG , and Slonks, how can we seize the next potential windfall? Before discussing that, let’s briefly review how the V4 Hook narrative gained popularity.

How did the V4 Hook narrative become popular?

Before V3, Uniswap was just a money-changing counter. You exchanged ETH for USDC, following the x*y=k formula, and that was it. After V4, hooks were integrated into the swap lifecycle, allowing anyone to insert their own code before, after, or during liquidity addition in a swap.

In fact, Uniswap v4 was launched as early as January 30 last year. But it wasn’t until recent projects like $SATO, $uPEG , and Slonks appeared that hooks sparked widespread discussion among retail traders.

SATO was the earliest among these three, launching around mid-April, about a week before uPEG. But it didn’t have KOL hype or heavyweight endorsements like Adam Hollander. Its dissemination was closer to the degen circle. Keywords like “pure on-chain,” “fair launch,” “no team allocation,” and “contract self-running” directly attracted V4 geeks and bonding curve veterans.

The real explosive point of the V4 Hook narrative was Unipeg (UPEG), and the name “Unipeg” carried strong nostalgic significance for Uniswap, giving it inherent narrative and attention from the start.

In 2019, Hayden Adams wrote a blog titled “Uniswap Birthday Blog—V0,” recalling that he originally wanted to name the protocol “Unipeg,” 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 the $70 billion DeFi blue-chip.

Eight years later, in April 2026, an anonymous developer (Twitter handle @unipegv4, reportedly related to the 0xHadrian blog) picked up this discarded name and gave it a new meaning: Uni + JPEG = uPEG. The NFT community has long jokingly called images “JPEG,” and since this originated in a Uniswap pool, it became Uniswap’s JPEG.

This story itself is viral-level material. It combines Hayden’s personal anecdote, Vitalik’s sarcastic remark, NFT slang, and the new mechanism of V4 into a single narrative centered on one name.

The “uPEG” story is very easy to tell and spread. It attracted OpenSea CMO Adam Hollander, who retweeted on April 25: “I’m interested in this concept, buying a little to try.”

That night, “uPEG” tripled in value, followed by the Uniswap team’s niko, Ouroboros co-founder Nafay, and meme coin KOL pow sharing their uPEG holdings on X. In two weeks, uPEG skyrocketed from zero to a $34.44 million market cap, with a unit price of $982. Related reading: “Market cap surpasses $23 million to new high, what magic does the new picture gold dog Unipeg hold?”

Meme coin KOL pow promoting uPEG

After uPEG, “Slonks” launched on May 1.

Developer Hirsch did something quite counterintuitive: he embedded a tiny AI image generation model (only 214KB, roughly the size of a low-res phone wallpaper) directly into an Ethereum smart contract. The model’s task was to mimic 10,000 CryptoPunks.

But a 214KB model cannot memorize 10,000 faces. Each image is 576 pixels, and the model typically makes about 24 errors per image, roughly 4% distortion. Out of 10,000 images, only 32 are perfectly replicated; the rest are “distorted punk.”

Slop diagram

Hirsch called these pixel errors “slop.” He posted on Twitter his attitude towards the project: “The slop is not a bug. It is the medium.” (Distortion is not a flaw; it’s the creative medium.)

The entire economic model is based on “the more errors, the more valuable.” Two Slonks of the same level can be merged, burning one to upgrade the other, with the new image’s slop only increasing. Any Slonk can be sent to the void, and by burning it, you can mint future $SLOP tokens (not officially released yet). All actions are executed via V4 hooks, verifiable on-chain.

Slonks didn’t explode immediately; during the high of uPEG’s $30 million market cap, it was almost ignored. The floor price hovered around 0.005 ETH, with little discussion on OpenSea. It wasn’t until 798, an old NFT veteran, retweeted on X that “mistakes are art,” turning it into a meme, that the project gained traction. Meanwhile, smart money on-chain, KOLs, media promotion, and trending on OpenSea’s homepage helped Slonks increase 60x in five days.

But the significance of SATO lies in its proof that “V4 hooks can create new economic models.” This was the premise for uPEG and Slonks to emerge later.

The significance of uPEG is that it translated the V4 hook DeFi concept into the NFT community. Retail investors suddenly realized that hooks are not just toys for DeFi geeks—they can create things they want to buy.

Slonks, on the basis of the attention generated by uPEG, created a more compelling story hook and an interesting economic model, further advancing the V4 Hook narrative.

What should we focus on to catch the next opportunity?

The core circle of foreign V4 Hook enthusiasts, mainly recommended users by Rhythm Editor:

1. Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams), founder of Uniswap, whose importance needs no elaboration.

2. saucepoint (@saucepoint), the godfather of hooks at the Uniswap Foundation, author of v4-template, whose template code is used by nearly all hook projects.

3. Official Uniswap (@Uniswap) and Uniswap Foundation (@UniswapFND), whose weekly Builder Update is the most important official signal source for the track.

4. niko (@niko_eth), a Uniswap Labs team member, a key figure in the first wave of uPEG KOLs.

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

6. Adam Hollander (@AdamHollander), OpenSea CMO, with a background as an early ecosystem promoter for Hashmasks and Pudgy Penguins, a key messenger crossing from DeFi to NFT.

7. Project accounts: uPEG official (@unipegv4), Unimon official (@unimonapp), Slonks official, SATO official (@Satothedog). Watching who they follow and interact with often reveals the next unmentioned hook project.

In addition, we can also monitor some websites related to V4 hooks and Uniswap:

1. HookRank.io, the cleanest V4 hook explorer, with over 1300 hooks listed, sorted by TVL/Volume/Fees, with “New” and “Trending” tags. It’s the first stop to see hooks not yet mentioned on Twitter but already gaining data.

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

3. Uniswap Foundation’s Builder Update on their blog, published weekly on Wednesday or Thursday, a must-follow for core users interested in Uniswap ecosystem narratives.

The latest blog also mentions community news like “Hooks,” “Unipeg,” etc.

4. Unichain Infinite Hackathon, where most winning projects are seed-stage; good for tracking core projects on Unichain.

5. Dune Uniswap V4 Tracker, showing total hooks, TVL distribution, and chain volume.

6. Dexscreener, a popular trading chart site, useful for spotting new V4 pairs early, such as when uPEG’s holder addresses jumped from 200 to over 4,000 within 24 hours—a clear signal.

7. OpenSea + Magic Eden Trending lists, where Slonks appeared on OpenSea Trending the day after launch. Ordinary NFT projects take weeks of marketing to reach that level. Meanwhile, Slonks’ daily trading volume on May 8 exceeded 575 ETH, surpassing CryptoPunks’ 129 ETH, indicating a track-level signal.

8. awesome-uniswap-hooks GitHub project, listing all hook experiments, useful for discovering early projects with interesting designs that don’t yet have tokens.

The next phase of the V4 Hook narrative

Based on this editor’s speculative brain dump, if the V4 Hook narrative doesn’t fade immediately, the next wave of narratives will likely follow three paths: short-term bug fixes for SATO, medium-term hook composability, and long-term Unichain becoming the hub of the entire track.

First, the short-term bug fix for SATO, which is currently being discussed in various groups.

The reason SATO has a “sat1 fix” is rooted in its hook contract. Any V4 hook wanting to replace Uniswap’s standard pricing must maintain its own “pool balance” ledger to calculate its curve. But the PoolManager also maintains a real ledger. Both sets of data must be synchronized each swap. If the sync logic is flawed, the two numbers drift apart—this is called dual-state drift among hook engineers.

Drift creates arbitrage opportunities. At a certain moment, the hook might think 1 SATO is worth X ETH, but the pool’s actual reserve shows Y ETH. Whoever detects this discrepancy first can exploit it. The addresses that made a profit of $360k weren’t trading based on market sentiment—they exploited a contract accounting bug.

sat1 packages itself as “one curve, single state,” using only one ledger, avoiding drift. Technically sound, but narratively manipulative—it tells retail investors “SATO has a bug, I am the correct version,” aiming to claim legitimacy.

This approach isn’t unique to V4. In Bitcoin, there are ORDI, SATS, 1000SATS; in ERC-404 era, Pandora, DN404, ERC-404 V2; in pump.fun era, BankrFun, ClankerFun—each new entrant claims to have fixed the previous issues.

The essence of bugfix plays isn’t technical repair but narrative usurpation. It’s not about actually fixing anything; it’s about making “original version has a bug” a consensus on Twitter, causing liquidity to flow from the old to the new.

V4 hooks have drastically lowered the cost of this script. Hooks are open-source; forking and changing three lines of code is enough to deploy. Each successful hook project comes with a clone generator. SATO/sat1 is the first example; uPEG2, Slinks will follow—inevitable.

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

Currently, each V4 pool can only have one hook. But some are working on “meta-hooks,” where one hook calls multiple sub-hooks, enabling composition.

Once this is operational, it means that uPEG’s image generation, Slonks’ NFT-token exchange, and SATO’s bonding curve can coexist in the same pool. A single swap can trigger image creation, modify the pricing curve, and mint an NFT simultaneously.

Many directions are possible: swap triggers music or audio generation (replacing SVG with MIDI, as audio is more viral); swap as an identity or reputation system (updating soul-bound points each time); prediction market hooks (treat swaps as bets, running Polymarket-style in LP); time-based hooks (longer holding reduces sell tax); cross-collection fusion (merging Pudgy Penguins and Azuki into new forms, most feasible among CC0 projects).

Rhythm BlockBeats believes that composability is the real ceiling of this track; single mechanisms are just demos.

Looking further ahead, Unichain might become the next hot chain.

Not because it’s technically superior, but because it benefits from Uniswap Foundation’s funding, traffic, and whitelist bias. Hooks on Unichain are more likely to be featured in official Builder Updates than on Ethereum mainnet.

To catch early signals, Rhythm BlockBeats also suggests monitoring Unichain separately: check the Dune dashboard for hook deployments, L2Beat for TVL and active addresses, and the official builder toolkit for new tools.