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

When Slonks launched, the mint price was under 0.004 ETH, equivalent to less than 70 RMB. Six days later, the floor price rose to 0.123 ETH, a 60x increase. uPEG started at $982 per unit and reached a $34.44 million market cap within two weeks. When SATO's market cap fell below $3 million, someone took advantage by directly bottoming out through the on-chain bonding curve, acquiring 260,000 SATO in one go. The market cap later surged to $40 million, quickly realizing a $360,000 profit.

All of these are not typical memecoin get-rich-quick narratives. They all point to one track: the Uniswap V4 Hook. In just over two weeks, these three projects pulled the entire V4 hook track from being "a DeFi geek's internal toy" into the mainstream view. Related reading: "Bull Market Coin Speculation: Will the 'Hook' Concept Become the Track to Start the Bull Market?"

For retail investors who missed the early train on $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks, how can we seize the next potential opportunity to get rich quick? 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 pre-V3 world, Uniswap was a currency exchange counter. You exchanged ETH for USDC, with the price following x*y=k, and that's it. After V4, this thing called a hook was stuffed into the swap lifecycle, allowing anyone to insert their code before, after, or during liquidity addition moments.

In fact, Uniswap V4 was launched as early as January 30 last year. However, it wasn't until the recent emergence of projects like $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks that the hook sparked widespread discussion among retail players.

SATO was the first to come out of these three, launching around mid-April, about a week earlier than uPEG. However, it didn't have a KOL explosion or heavyweight figures like Adam Hollander endorsing it. Its dissemination path was closer to the degen circle. Keywords such as "pure on-chain," "fair launch," "no team allocation," and "contract self-operated" directly attracted V4 geeks and bonding curve veterans.

The true turning point of the V4 Hook narrative lies in Unipeg (UPEG), and the name "Unipeg" carries strong symbolism due to its deep connection to Uniswap, giving it an inherent narrative and attention.

In 2019, Hayden Adams wrote a blog post titled "Uniswap Birthday Blog—V0," where he recalled that when he was naming the Uniswap protocol, he initially wanted to name it "Unipeg," meaning a combination of a unicorn and a Pegasus. However, Vitalik took a look and said, "Unipeg? That sounds more like Uniswap." So Hayden decided to name it Uniswap.

"Uniswap" replaced "Unipeg" and became the name of the $700 billion DeFi blue-chip.

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

This story itself is viral material. It encapsulates Hayden's personal anecdote, Vitalik's quip, NFT jargon, and V4's new mechanism, all within a name.

The story of "uPEG" is very captivating and highly shareable. This attracted OpenSea CMO Adam Hollander, who retweeted on April 25, saying, "I'm interested in this concept, buying some to try it out."

That night, "uPEG" tripled, followed by Uniswap team member niko, Ouroboros co-founder Nafay, and meme coin KOL pow all sharing their uPEG holdings on X platform. In two weeks, uPEG went from 0 to a $34.44 million market cap, with a price of $982. For more information, read: "Breaking through a $23 million market cap to achieve a new high, what magic does the new image token Unipeg have?."

meme Coin KOL pow Promotion uPEG

Following uPEG, the "Slonks" were launched on May 1st.

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

However, the 214KB model couldn't remember 10,000 faces. With each image consisting of 576 pixels, the model would make an average of around 24 errors per image, resulting in approximately a 4% distortion rate. Out of the 10,000 images, only 32 were replicated perfectly, while the rest were all "sloppy punks."

slop Example

Hirsch referred to these erroneously drawn pixels as slop. He then expressed the project's philosophy on Twitter: "The slop is not a bug. It is the medium."

The entire economic model is based on the idea that "the more mistakes, the more valuable." Two Slonks of the same level can merge, burning one to upgrade the other, with the new image's slop only increasing and never decreasing. Any Slonk can be sent to the void, where based on the slop quantity, future $SLOP tokens (which are not officially launched yet) will be minted at a 1:1 ratio. Each action is executed through a V4 hook and can be verified on-chain.

Slonks did not immediately take off upon launch. In the first few days, amidst the $30 million market cap frenzy of uPEG, Slonks were almost overlooked. The floor price hovered around 0.005 ETH, with little discussion on OpenSea, until a well-known figure in the NFT community, 798, relayed the project on Twitter. They turned the phrase "making mistakes is art" into a shareable meme, coinciding with further smart money on-chain capturing, KOL and media promotions, and featuring on the OpenSea homepage for distribution. In just five days, Slonks surged 60x.

However, the significance of SATO lies in its underlying proof that the "V4 hook can create a new economic model." This was a prerequisite for the later appearance of uPEG and Slonks.

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

Building on the attention dividend created by uPEG, Slonks has developed a stronger narrative hook and an interesting economic model, further advancing the V4 Hook narrative.

What to Focus on to Seize the Next Opportunity?

For the V4 Hook core community, the DappRadar team mainly recommends the following users:

1. Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams), Uniswap founder, need I say more about his importance.

2. saucepoint (@saucepoint), the godfather of hooks at the Uniswap Foundation, author of the v4-template, almost all hook project starter codes are based on the template he wrote.

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

4. niko (@niko_eth), a member of the Uniswap Labs team, it can be said that he played a crucial role in the first wave of KOL relay for uPEG.

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

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

7. Project Accounts: uPEG Official (@unipegv4), Unimon Official (@unimonapp), Official Slonks Account, SATO Official (@Satothedog). Observing who they follow and interact with can often uncover the next hook project that has not yet been named.

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

1. HookRank.io is currently the cleanest V4 Hook explorer, with 1300+ hooks listed, ranked by TVL/Volume/Fees, and featuring "New" and "Trending" tags. This is the first stop to see hooks that have not yet been mentioned on Twitter but already have data available.

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

3. Uniswap Foundation Builder Update on the blog, released by the Foundation every Wednesday or Thursday. Core users who follow the Uniswap ecosystem will not miss out on the hottest narratives.

The latest Blog post also mentioned community news such as "Hooks" and "Unipeg".

4. Keep an eye on the Unichain Infinite Hackathon competition, where most award-winning projects are seed-funded, allowing us to focus on core projects on Unichain.

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

6. Not to mention Dexscreener, a commonly used cryptocurrency candlestick chart website. It is used to monitor new V4 pairs and serves as an early signal source for projects that have not yet been promoted by Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). For example, when the holder addresses of uPEG jumped from 200 to 4000+ within 24 hours, the slope itself is a signal.

7. The Trending list of OpenSea + Magic Eden saw Slonks appearing on OpenSea Trending on the second day of its launch, while regular NFT projects usually take several weeks of marketing to get there. At the same time, on May 8th, Slonks had a daily trading volume of 575 ETH, surpassing CryptoPunks' 129 ETH. Any new project with a daily trading volume higher than CryptoPunks during the same period is considered a signal of competitive level.

8. The GitHub project awesome-uniswap-hooks, where all hook experimental projects are registered, is suitable for discovering early-stage projects with "interesting design" that do not yet have a token.

The Next Stage of the V4 Hook Narrative

In this speculative scenario from the self-proclaimed Lawdynamics editor, if the V4 Hook narrative does not immediately fade, the next wave of the narrative is likely to follow three main lines of development: short-term will focus on SATO's bug-fixing project, mid-term will explore the composability of hooks, and long-term will aim for Unichain to become the central force of the entire space.

Firstly, in the short term, there is a bug-fixing project related to SATO, which is currently a hot topic in various chats.

The reason SATO has seen the emergence of projects like sat1 for "fixing" lies within its hook contract. Any V4 hook that aims to replace Uniswap's standard pricing must maintain its own record of "how much money is in the pool" to calculate its own curve formula. However, Uniswap's PoolManager also maintains its own accurate record. With these two sets of records coexisting, synchronization is required for each swap. If the synchronization logic is not robust, the two values will drift apart over time, a phenomenon known as dual-state drift within the hook engineering community.

This drift creates arbitrage opportunities. At a certain point, the internal calculations of the hook suggest that 1 SATO should be worth X ETH, but the pool's real reserves show Y ETH. Whoever notices this difference first can benefit. The two addresses with a combined profit of $360,000 did not exploit market sentiment but rather a contract's accounting loophole.

sat1 presents itself as a "one curve, single-state" solution, using only one set of records and avoiding drift. While the engineering fix is reasonable, the narrative behind it is more strategic—it tells retail investors, "SATO has a bug, I am the correct version," with the aim of seizing legitimacy.

This playstyle is not unique to V4. The Bitcoin ecosystem has ORDI, SATS, 1000SATS; during the ERC-404 era, there were Pandora, DN404, ERC-404 V2; and in the pump.fun era, there were BankrFun, ClankerFun. Each successor claims to have "fixed the previous one's issues."

The essence of a bugfix fork is not technical improvement but narrative plunder. It doesn't actually need to fix anything; it just needs to create a consensus on Twitter that the "original fork has a bug," and liquidity will move from the original fork to the new fork.

The V4 hook has dramatically reduced the cost of this script. The Hook is open source, and forking and deploying it only requires changing three lines of code. Every successful hook project comes with a fork generator. SATO/sat1 set the template, and soon we will see uPEG2, Slinks, as this is inevitable.

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

Currently, in V4, a pool can only host one hook. However, there are already efforts for a "meta-hook," where a hook internally calls multiple sub-hooks to achieve composite behavior.

Once this is achieved, it would mean that uPEG's image generation, Slonks' NFT-token exchange, and SATO's bonding curve can coexist in the same pool. With one swap, you trigger image generation, update the pricing curve, and mint an NFT simultaneously.

The possibilities for future development are vast: swaps triggering music or audio generation (switching SVG to MIDI, where audio is more easily shareable); swaps serving as an identity or reputation system (each swap updates soul-bound points); a prediction market hook (using swaps as betting actions, similar to the Polymarket model running within LP); time-based hooks (the longer you hold, the lower the sell tax); cross-collection fusion gameplay (using hooks to merge Pudgy Penguin and Azuki into a new form, the most feasible between CC0 projects).

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

In the long run, Unichain may become the next hot chain.

Not because its technology is superior, but because it has the funding, traffic, and whitelist bias of the Uniswap Foundation. The likelihood of a hook project on Unichain receiving official Builder Update exposure is an order of magnitude higher than on the Ethereum mainnet.

If you want to catch the earliest signals, DapHub's BlockBeats editor also suggests setting up a separate monitoring for Unichain: check the number of hook deployments on the Unichain dashboard on Dune, TVL and active addresses on L2Beat, and new tool updates on the official builder toolkit, and more.

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