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

The mint price when Slonks launched 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 price of uPEG was $982, going from zero to a market cap of $34.44 million in two weeks. When SATO’s market cap fell below $3 million, someone directly bought the dip through on-chain 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 quick riches. 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 Speculating on New Coins, Will the ‘Hook’ Concept Become the Track to Start a Bull Market?”

For retail investors who missed the early opportunities with $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 swapping 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 and swaps.

In fact, Uniswap v4 was launched as early as January 30 last year. But it wasn’t until the recent emergence of projects like $SATO, $uPEG , and Slonks 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 lacked KOL hype and endorsements from heavyweight figures like Adam Hollander. Its dissemination was closer to the degen circle. Keywords like “pure on-chain,” “fair launch,” “no team allocation,” and “self-running contract” directly attracted V4 geeks and bonding curve veterans.

The real explosive point of the V4 Hook narrative is Unipeg (UPEG), and the name “Unipeg” carries 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 “JPEGs,” and since this originated in a Uniswap pool, it became Uniswap’s JPEG.

This story itself is viral material. It combines Hayden’s personal anecdote, Vitalik’s sarcastic remark, NFT slang, and the new mechanism of V4—all encapsulated in 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 price of $982. Related reading: “Market cap surpassing $23 million hits new high, what’s the magic behind the new image gold dog Unipeg?”

Meme coin KOL pow promotes uPEG

Following 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 214KB isn’t enough to memorize 10,000 faces. Each image is 576 pixels, and the model typically makes about 24 errors per image, roughly 4% distortion. Only 32 of the 10,000 images are perfectly replicated; the rest are “distorted punks.”

Slop illustration

Hirsch called these pixel errors “slop.” He then 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 built on the idea that “the more errors, the more valuable.” Two Slonks of the same level can be merged, burning one to upgrade the other, with the slop only increasing. Any Slonk can be sent to the void, and an equal amount of $SLOP tokens (not yet officially released) can be minted by burning slop. All actions are executed via V4 hooks, verifiable on-chain.

Slonks didn’t explode immediately after launch; 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 veteran NFT collectors on X shared memes like “art is just mistakes,” that the project gained traction. Meanwhile, smart money on-chain, KOLs, and media promotion, along with trending on OpenSea, caused Slonks to surge 60x in five days.

But the significance of SATO is that it proved at the fundamental level that “V4 hooks can create new economic models.” This was the prerequisite for uPEG and Slonks to emerge.

uPEG’s importance lies in translating the V4 hook concept from DeFi into the NFT space. Retail investors suddenly realized that hooks are not just toys for DeFi geeks—they can create things they want to buy.

Slonks built on the attention generated by uPEG, with a more compelling story hook and interesting economic models, further advancing the V4 Hook narrative.

What should we focus on to catch the next opportunity?

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

1. Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams), founder of Uniswap, no need to elaborate on his importance.

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

3. Official Uniswap (@Uniswap) and Uniswap Foundation (@UniswapFND), whose weekly Builder Update is the most important official signal 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 in early ecosystems like Hashmasks and Pudgy Penguins, a key messenger crossing from DeFi to NFT.

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

Besides, we can also monitor some V4 hook and Uniswap-related sites:

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”

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

5. Dune Uniswap V4 Tracker, to see total hooks, TVL distribution, and chain activity.

6. Dexscreener, a popular trading K-line site, useful for early signals on new V4 pairs, e.g., when uPEG’s addresses jumped from 200 to over 4,000 in 24 hours, indicating potential.

7. OpenSea + Magic Eden trending lists, where Slonks appeared on OpenSea Trending the day after launch; typical NFT projects take weeks of marketing to reach trending. Meanwhile, Slonks’ daily volume hit 575 ETH on May 8, surpassing CryptoPunks’ 129 ETH, a clear sector-level signal.

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

Next stage of the V4 Hook narrative

Based on this editor’s unqualified speculation, if the V4 Hook narrative doesn’t fade immediately, the next wave 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 discussed in many groups.

The reason for the “sat1 fix” is rooted in its hook contract. Any V4 hook wanting to replace Uniswap’s standard pricing must maintain its own “pool balance” accounting. Meanwhile, the PoolManager also maintains a real account. Both sets of books must stay synchronized; otherwise, swaps will drift, creating dual-state drift.

Drift creates arbitrage opportunities. At a certain moment, the hook might think 1 SATO equals X ETH, but the pool’s actual reserve shows Y ETH. The first to detect this discrepancy can exploit it. The addresses with $360k profit weren’t reacting to market sentiment—they exploited a contract accounting bug.

sat1 positions itself as “one curve, single state,” using only one set of books, avoiding drift. Technically sound, but intentionally misleading in narrative—telling retail investors “SATO has a bug, I am the correct version,” aiming to claim legitimacy.

This approach isn’t unique to V4. The Bitcoin ecosystem has ORDI, SATS, 1000SATS; the ERC-404 era had Pandora, DN404, ERC-404 V2; pump.fun had BankrFun, ClankerFun—each claiming to fix the previous issues.

The essence of bugfixing isn’t technical repair but narrative conquest. It doesn’t need to actually fix anything—just spreading the idea that “the original has a bug” on Twitter creates consensus, and liquidity flows from the old to the new.

V4 hooks have drastically lowered the cost of this script. Hooks are open-source; forking and changing a few lines can deploy a new project. Each successful hook project comes with a clone generator. SATO/sat1 are the first templates; uPEG2, Slinks will follow, as destined.

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

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

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

Many directions are possible: swaps could trigger music or audio generation (replacing SVG with MIDI, as audio is more viral); swaps could serve as identity or reputation systems (updating soul-bound points); prediction market hooks (treat swaps as bets, running Polymarket-style); time-based hooks (longer holding reduces sell tax); cross-collection fusions (merging Pudgy Penguins and Azuki into new forms, especially feasible among CC0 projects).

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

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

Not because of superior technology, but because it benefits from Uniswap Foundation’s funding, traffic, and whitelist bias. Projects on Unichain are more likely to get official exposure through 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 official builder toolkits for new updates.

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