What has changed in the sato white paper 2.0? What are the similarities and differences between the copycat sat1 and sato?

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

On the evening of May 7, 2026, amidst market skepticism regarding the pricing drift of sato in the curve and its split from secondary market prices, the sato official website updated the white paper entry to "whitepaper 2.0," and the front-end trading panel was also synchronized, changing from buy / sell to mint / burn.

This is not an ordinary wording revision. Comparing 1.0 and 2.0, it can be seen that the focus rewritten overnight by the official is not on sentiment, nor on narrative, but on clarifying the market's understanding of how sato is traded, under what circumstances it will be burned, and why the official price is different from the secondary market price.

At the same time, the market value of sato has dropped from nearly 40 million dollars to 14.4 million dollars since yesterday. On the other hand, the copycat project sat1 has also released its own white paper and front-end website, with its noon market value once reaching 10 million dollars, but has now fallen to around 5.2 million dollars.

It should be noted that both sato and sat1 are currently in a phase of high volatility and high emotional driving. While the mechanism appears sophisticated, it does not mean that the market will operate as designed. Any mechanism innovation cannot replace risk management, and one must combine their own risk tolerance for careful decision-making before participating.

What has changed in the sato white paper 2.0?

The core of version 1.0 discussed an indexed issuance curve, a selfDeprecated (buy minting function permanently closed) at 99% of supply, no pre-mining, no allocation, no admin role, no upgrade path, and a set of rules where selling would burn.

Version 2.0 has changed the writing style. It has been split into several clear chapters: issuance, pools as reserves, curve mathematics and limitations, minting halt, trading phases, routing and trading choices.

In the new version, a very important addition is that it has fully written out the three core formulas of sato in the curve:

• Cumulative ETH when the minted supply is e: q(e) = K · (1 − e^(−e/S)), where K = 21,000,000, S = 500 ETH
• Price per coin at position e: p(e) = (S / K) · e^(e/S)
• When current supply is q and the amount burned is b, the ETH to be returned: Δe(q, b) = S · ln((K − q + b) / (K − q))

These three formulas explain the operational logic of sato's curve very plainly: the first defines how cumulative supply is generated, the second determines the price at minting, and the third decides how much ETH should be returned when burning. In other words, sato's issuance, pricing, and exit are not three separate logics but three facets of the same curve.

The most significant changes also include the following:

First, version 2.0 clearly states that the existence of the secondary market is a part of the core market structure. The bonding curve is a Uniswap V4 pool with a hook, while the sato/usdt secondary market is another independent V4 pool. Both share the PoolManager but are not the same pool.

Second, "sell" has been completely rewritten as "burn". Although the old version mentioned that selling back to the Hook would burn tokens, version 2.0 elaborated on this: only when users convert sato back to ETH through the curve pool will the total supply decrease, which means a burn. Conversely, if users use the secondary sato/usdt pool, they are simply conducting AMM trades with LPs, which will not burn tokens and will not use curve reserves. This point is crucial; only selling into the curve will result in a burn.

Third, version 2.0 includes "routing" in the white paper. The official site now states clearly that the minting and burning on this site will directly call the satoSwapRouter route and will be forced to use the curve pool, not automatically switching to the secondary pool for better prices. This means that the official front-end is not a "market optimal executor," but a "direct access to the curve."

Fourth, the new front-end separates the three types of prices: market, burn, mint. The new front-end has visualized these differences. Based on the current data from the official website, as of the time of writing, the market price is approximately 0.7241 dollars, the burn price is approximately 0.7066 dollars, and the mint price is approximately 1.2 dollars. This means that currently minting through the official curve costs about 65% more than the secondary market price; while the burn price is very close to the secondary market price. It is almost putting the overnight dispute into a clear view: the mint price of the curve, the burn price of the curve, and the market price of the secondary pool are not the same thing.

Fifth, version 2.0 rewrites the description of the "minting termination line". The version 1.0 explanation of the minting termination line was: 99% of K is the termination line, corresponding to about 20.79 million sato, which corresponds to approximately 2302 ETH. Version 2.0 has changed the wording to something resembling "market reachable boundary," written as "the actual reachable supply scale is roughly around 20.5 million sato," and added a sentence that as burning occurs, this reachable supply will slightly decline. In other words, version 2.0 weakens the intuition that "users will naturally push the supply to 20.79 million sato" and emphasizes that this is a reachable curve influenced by market behavior rather than a linear process that must be completed.

What are the similarities and differences between the copycat sat1 and sato?

At the same time, the copycat project sat1 has also launched a structurally similar new version of its white paper and front-end website.

The core concepts of both are very close:

• Both are ERC-20s on Ethereum, relying on on-chain contracts for direct issuance, without depending on team custody, upgrades, governance or admin permissions;
• Both bind minting, burning, and reserves within the same curve mechanism;
• Both use the same type of asymptotic issuance curve: with the accumulation of ETH increasing, it becomes increasingly difficult to mint new tokens, with prices rising exponentially, approaching the limit of 21 million but not actually reaching it;
• Both charge a bilateral 0.3% friction fee, and the fee is not paid to the team but is retained within the Hook/curve;
• Both position themselves as "issuance machines without operators," as opposed to traditional projects which have roadmaps, upgrades, and team treasuries.

The biggest difference between the two is how the "state variables are recorded."

sat1 points out in its white paper that sato's problem is that it uses two sets of states to drive the mechanism:

• ethCum: the accumulated ETH in the curve;
• totalMintedFair: the issued supply in the curve.

The buying path relies more on ethCum, while selling and self-deprecation (the 99% threshold) rely more on totalMintedFair. After the added early-stage random multiplier, these two quantities no longer strictly maintain the same invariant, leading to "one contract, two curve positions."

This will cause ethCum to potentially move faster than totalMintedFair, and back-and-forth buying and selling will worsen this shift.

In contrast, sat1's design rules are: to retain only one main state.

• The contract only stores one curve state: ethCum.
• Fair supply = Curve.totalMinted(ethCum).
• Price = Curve.marginalPrice(ethCum).
• Sell quotes are also derived from this same position.
• SelfDeprecated is also directly judged by this same curve position.

Thus, the essential difference in the mechanism is:

• sato: Issuance, exit, and halt judgment have resulted in "state splitting" in practice.
• sat1: Enforces "unified states," deriving all key logic from the same curve position.

Regarding curve fees, although both charge a 0.3% fee, in sato, the white paper states that each mint and burn incurs a 0.3% fee, which is permanently retained in the hook. The issue is that sato simultaneously has both ethCum and totalMintedFair as key states, and after early-stage random multipliers, they will diverge. Therefore, the final observed "thickening of reserves" is not solely because of the 0.3% fee but is also mixed with additional offsets caused by state drift. In other words, the fee itself does not change, but it overlaps incorrectly with the states.

In sat1:

• When buying 1.000 ETH, the mint quote is calculated only on 0.997 ETH, but 1.000 ETH all goes into the reserve.
• When selling, the user receives 0.3% less, and the withheld ETH remains in the Hook.

This means that sat1's 0.3% is also a "fee retained in the pool," but it is designed solely to increase reserves without interfering with the primary curve state, because all core logic recognizes only ethCum as a single state.

Finally, it needs to be reiterated that any mechanism innovation cannot replace risk management, and participation must still be based on one's own risk tolerance for careful decision-making.