Author:Jaleel plus six,Cookie

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

When Slonks launched, the mint price was less than 0.004 ETH, less than 70 yuan, and 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 SATO's market cap fell below $3 million, someone directly bottomed out through the on-chain bonding curve, opening a position of 260,000 SATO, and the market cap later surged to $40 million, quickly realizing a profit of $360,000.

These are not ordinary memecoin stories of getting rich. They point to a track, Uniswap V4 Hook. In just two and a half weeks, these three projects pulled the entire V4 hook track from being a "toy for DeFi geeks" into the mainstream spotlight. Related reading: 《Will the "Hook" concept become a track that opens the bull market up?》

For retail investors who didn’t get in early on $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks, how can we catch the next potential opportunity for wealth? Before discussing this, we need to briefly review how the V4 Hook narrative became popular.

How did the V4 Hook narrative become popular?

In the world before V3, Uniswap was a money exchange counter. You exchanged ETH for USDC, the price followed x*y=k, and that was it. After V4, the hook was inserted into the swap lifecycle, allowing anyone to insert their own code during the moments before or after a swap or when adding liquidity.

In fact, Uniswap v4 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 caused the hook to gain widespread discussion among retail players.

SATO was the first to launch among these three, going live around mid-April, about a week earlier than uPEG. However, it did not have a KOL to ignite it, nor did it have heavyweights like Adam Hollander to endorse it. Its传播路径 was closer to the degen circle. Keywords like "pure on-chain," "fair launch," "no team allocation," and "the contract runs itself," directly attracted V4 geeks and veterans of the bonding curve.

The real breakout narrative of V4 Hook was in Unipeg (UPEG), and the name "Unipeg" has strong commemorative significance for Uniswap, so it inherently came with a narrative and attention.

In 2019, Hayden Adams published a blog titled 《Uniswap Birthday Blog—V0》， reminiscing how he originally thought of naming the Uniswap protocol "Unipeg," symbolizing a combination of unicorn and Pegasus. However, Vitalik looked at it and said, "Unipeg? That sounds more like Uniswap." Thus, Hayden settled on the name Uniswap.

"Uniswap" replaced "Unipeg" and became the name of a $70 billion DeFi blue chip.

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

This story itself is viral material. It encapsulates Hayden's personal anecdotes, Vitalik's quip, the jargon of the NFT circle, and the new mechanism of V4 into one name.

The story of "uPEG" is very easy to tell and spread. This attracted OpenSea CMO Adam Hollander, who on April 25 tweeted, "I'm interested in this concept; I'll buy some to try."

That night, "uPEG" tripled, and then niko from the Uniswap team followed, Ouroboros co-founder Nafay, and meme coin KOL pow also shared their uPEG holdings on the X platform. In just 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 currency Unipeg possess, surpassing $23 million in market cap and setting new highs?》.

meme coin KOL pow promotes uPEG

After uPEG, "Slonks" followed, launching on May 1.

Developer Hirsch did something that sounds very incongruous: he directly put an AI image generation model (only 214KB, about the size of a low-resolution mobile wallpaper) into the 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 the model typically makes errors in around 24 of them, about a 4% distortion rate. Out of 10,000 images, only 32 were perfectly replicated; the rest were all "distorted punks."

slop illustration

Hirsch dubbed these wrongly painted pixels as slop. He then wrote on Twitter about the project's philosophy: "The slop is not a bug. It is the medium." (Distortion is not a flaw; distortion is the creative medium)

The entire economic model is based on the idea that "the more errors, the more valuable." Two Slonks of the same grade can merge, burn one to upgrade the other, with the new Slonk's slop only increasing. Any Slonk can be sent into the void to mint future $SLOP tokens (which have not yet been officially launched) based on the slop quantity at a ratio of 1:1. Every action is completed through the V4 hook, verifiable on-chain.

Slonks did not set the market ablaze upon launching; for the first few days, it was almost overlooked amid uPEG's $30 million market cap glory. The floor price hovered around 0.005 ETH, with little discussion on OpenSea, until 798, a group of old NFT veterans started tweeting about it on X, turning the phrase "mistakes in art" into a meme that could be shared. Meanwhile, on-chain smart money further caught on, KOLs and media began to promote it, and OpenSea's trending page helped distribute traffic, resulting in Slonks multiplying 60 times in five days.

However, the significant meaning of SATO lies in its fundamental proof that "V4 hook can create new economic models." This is the premise for later occurrences of uPEG and Slonks.

The significance of uPEG lies in translating the concept of V4 hook for the NFT circle. Retail investors suddenly realized that the hook was not just a toy for DeFi geeks; it could create something they also wanted to buy.

Slonks created a stronger narrative hook with an intriguing economic model on top of the attention dividend generated by uPEG, further driving the V4 Hook narrative.

What to focus on to seize the next opportunity?

In the core circle of V4 Hook abroad, the Rhythm editors primarily recommend the following users:

1. Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams), the founder of Uniswap, the importance speaks for itself.

2. saucepoint (@saucepoint), the hook godfather of Uniswap Foundation, author of the v4-template, with almost all hook projects derived from his template.

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

4. niko (@niko_eth), a team member of Uniswap Labs, who played a key role as the first wave of KOL relay for uPEG.

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

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

7. Project accounts: uPEG official (@unipegv4), Unimon official (@unimonapp), Slonks official account, SATO official (@Satothedog). Observing who they follow and interact with often reveals the next hook project that has yet to be named.

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

1. HookRank.io is currently the cleanest V4 hook explorer, featuring over 1300 hooks, ranked by TVL/Volume/Fees, with "New" and "Trending" tags. This is where you can see hooks that have not yet been mentioned on Twitter but have already shown data.

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

3. Uniswap Foundation Builder Update is updated on the blog. The foundation releases it every Wednesday or Thursday, and core users who follow the Uniswap ecosystem won't miss the hottest narratives.

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

4. Unichain Infinite Hackathon contest, almost all awarded projects are seeds, from which we can monitor core projects on Unichain.

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

6. Dexscreener speaks for itself, a commonly used trading K-line website, used to monitor newly created V4 pairs, it’s an early signal source for seeing projects not yet ignited by KOLs. For example, at that time, the holding address for uPEG jumped from 200 to over 4000 in 24 hours, which itself is a signal.

7. OpenSea + Magic Eden's Trending list, Slonks appeared on OpenSea Trending the day after its launch, while ordinary NFT projects take weeks of marketing to get there. Meanwhile, on May 8, Slonks' single-day trading volume of 575 ETH surpassed CryptoPunks' 129 ETH; any new project with a single-day trading volume exceeding CryptoPunks during the same period is a sign of a high-level track.

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

The next phase of the V4 Hook narrative

Based on the unverified speculation from the Rhythm BlockBeats editor, if the V4 Hook narrative doesn't halt immediately, the next wave of narratives is likely to follow three lines: short-term, SATO's bug fixing, mid-term, the composability of hooks, and long-term, Unichain becoming the center of the entire track.

Firstly, in the short term, there's considerable discussion in various chat groups about SATO's bug fix.

The emergence of sat1 as a "fixing disk" for SATO stems from its hook contract. Any V4 hook that wants to replace Uniswap's standard pricing must maintain its own record of "how much money is in the pool" and use that figure to calculate its curve formula. However, the Uniswap PoolManager also maintains a real account. When both accounts exist simultaneously, every swap needs to synchronize once. If the synchronization logic is not tightly written, the two figures will drift apart, a phenomenon known among hook engineers as dual-state drift.

Drift creates arbitrage opportunities. At any moment, the hook may believe that 1 SATO is worth X ETH, while the actual reserve in the pool shows Y ETH; whoever discovers the difference first can seize the opportunity. The two addresses earning a $360,000 profit did not exploit market sentiment; they found a flaw in the contract's accounting.

sat1 positions itself as "one curve, single state," using only one set of accounts with no drift. This engineering fix is reasonable but narratively intentional—it tells retail investors, "SATO has a bug; I am the correct version," aiming for legitimacy.

This strategy is not unique to V4. The Bitcoin ecosystem has ORDI, SATS, 1000SATS, the ERC-404 era had Pandora, DN404, ERC-404 V2; during the pump.fun era, there were BankrFun, ClankerFun, and every follower claimed, "I've fixed the previous problem."

The essence of bug fix discs is not a technical repair; it is narrative plunder. It doesn’t need to genuinely fix anything; it only needs to make "the original disk has a bug" a consensus on Twitter for the liquidity to move from the original disk to the new disk.

V4 hook has reduced the cost of this script to an unprecedented low. The hook is open-source; forking it and changing three lines of code is enough to deploy it. Every successful hook project comes with a replica generator. SATO/sat1 is the first pair of templates, and we can expect the emergence of uPEG2 and Slinks. This is inevitable.

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

Currently, one pool in V4 can only attach one hook. However, someone is already working on "meta-hooks," where one hook internally calls multiple sub-hooks to achieve composite behaviors.

Once this is established, it means that uPEG's image generation + Slonks' NFT-token redemption + SATO's bonding curve can all exist simultaneously in the same pool. With a single swap, you can trigger image generation, rewrite pricing curves, and mint NFTs.

There are many possible directions to push forward: swaps triggering music or audio generation (switching SVG to MIDI, as audio is easier to circulate than images); swaps as identity or reputation systems (updating soul-bound credits with each swap); prediction market hooks (treating swaps as betting actions, with Polymarket logic running within LPs); time-based hooks (the longer the hold, the lower the sell tax); cross-collection fusion gameplay (using hooks to merge Pudgy Penguin and Azuki into a new form, between CC0 projects is the most feasible).

Rhythm BlockBeats editors believe that composability is the true ceiling of this track; single point mechanics are merely demos.

Looking further ahead for 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 tilt from the Uniswap Foundation. Hook projects on Unichain have a probability of exposure to the official Builder Update that is an order of magnitude higher than that of the Ethereum mainnet.

If you're looking to catch the earliest signals, the Rhythm BlockBeats editors suggest creating a separate monitoring system for Unichain: Dune’s Unichain dashboard to view hook deployment numbers, L2Beat to track TVL and active addresses, and the official builder toolkit for updates on new tools, etc.