The market has never lacked tools for issuing coins; what it lacks is a genius dev who can write mechanisms.

Written by: Lacie Zhang, Bitget Wallet Researcher

This year, the most commonly heard phrase in the industry is: Crypto is no longer interesting. Liquidity has gone to the US stock market, talent has moved to AI, and the narrative cannot keep pace with Claude's update rhythm.

The main battlefield for global venture capital is almost in the technology stocks of the US, South Korea, and Taiwan, especially in storage, AI computing power, chips, and electrical infrastructure. On the crypto side, there is only a battle for existing resources; the memes on Solana and BNB Chain have long devolved into an internal PvP arena where dog fighters lose nine out of ten times. On-chain sentiment has degraded from occasional FOMO to "nothing is more sorrowful than a dead heart."

Even people in crypto have started to doubt whether this circle can still create things that are not imitations of others, not chasing hotspots, and purely belong to this industry.

Just when everyone thought this round of meme market was about to end, a batch of assets that looked "hard to understand" suddenly appeared on EVM, as if resurrected:

• uPEG (Unipeg): Discovered by the market on April 25, it soared approximately 15 times by May 8. Each transaction would "draw" a 24x24 pixel unicorn NFT on-chain out of thin air.
• Slonks / $SLOP: Launched on May 1, in just 5 days the floor price surged from the mint price to 0.062 ETH, with 318 ETH traded in 24 hours. It packed a 22.7KB transformer model into the mainnet to redraw CryptoPunks, with the distortions and misalignments during the redrawing process defining its artistic nature.
• $SATO: Deployed on May 3, it amassed a contract reserve of 1076 ETH within 11 hours, peaking at a market cap close to 40 million USD. Once the minting reaches 99%, the contract will automatically stop minting, preventing further issuance.
• $SHIT (Dogeshit): Launched on May 9. A meme coin minted directly by an AI agent, users cannot manually adjust the contract but must instruct Claude to "mint me some shit" through a dialogue box, with a relayer covering the gas fees for minting. Behind it is EIP-7702 + MCP + V4 Hook.
• $HORN: Launched on May 8. In a "time is currency" experiment, the number of tokens a user receives = ETH input × holding duration, with minting rare NFTs requiring the burning of both the holding key and horn tokens for dual consumption.

These assets have different mechanisms and narratives, but as soon as you open their contracts, you will see the same dependency line:

import {IHooks} from "@uniswap/v4-core/src/interfaces/IHooks.sol";

Yes, Uniswap V4 Hook.

The Bitget Wallet Research Institute will discuss four major questions in this article:

• What exactly is a Hook? It went live on the mainnet on January 30, 2025; why was it not understood until May 2026? How can it become a new tool for asset issuance?
• What are the mechanism differences between leading assets? What is the essential difference between them and the Pandora wave of ERC-404/tokencoin integration back in the day?
• What is the next wave of narrative really hidden beneath the surface? Why do we say that this batch of assets that has emerged may just be an appetizer?
• From a cyclical perspective, how should ordinary people participate and avoid pitfalls?

1. Uniswap V4: The asset issuance tool that was shelved for 16 months

To understand why V4 Hook could suddenly ignite this asset issuance experiment, we need to revisit a timeline that has rarely been fully organized.

1.1 A product line that arrived late

Many people think that Uniswap V4 was just recently released. In fact, the draft white paper for V4 was released as early as June 2023. At that time, the team aimed to launch as soon as possible after the Ethereum Dencun upgrade (March 2024) and used Transient Storage (EIP-1153) to create the Flash Accounting key architecture.

However, V4 ultimately did not keep to the original schedule.

The reason is that its security audit scale is almost unprecedented in DeFi history: 9 independent third-party audits, the largest bug bounty pool in history of $15.5 million. OpenZeppelin even found a Critical-level vulnerability in submission d5d4957, forcing the team to rewrite some code. The entire timeline was dragged from Q3 2024 until January 30, 2025, when V4 was officially deployed on the Ethereum mainnet and subsequently expanded to 12 EVM chains including Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and BNB Chain.

There was a gap of more than 15 months from the time of uPEG, SATO, and Slonks' recent surge. An important protocol upgrade that was repeatedly emphasized by the official was cold in its own home for over a year, only to finally be pushed to the forefront when a batch of new assets emerged.

1.2 The core change of Uniswap V4: Opening the logical boundaries of trading pools

To understand what V4 changed, it may be helpful to first start with the transition from V1 to V3.

In the past versions of Uniswap, each trading pool was an independently deployed contract, with pools generally operating independently. When project teams wanted to issue a coin, they typically first deployed an ERC-20 token contract and then took the tokens and ETH to create a trading pool on Uniswap. However, the core rules of that pool were not something the project team could decide. The V2 era involved constant product curves, while the V3 era introduced concentrated liquidity mechanisms, with pricing and liquidity logic pre-written by Uniswap. The project teams could choose parameters but found it difficult to modify the underlying rules.

Therefore, during the period from V1 to V3, token contracts and trading markets were separate. Tokens were responsible for issuance, and Uniswap was responsible for trading, with minimal programmable connections between the two. Project teams could design tokenomics, but once in the trading pool, assets had to operate according to Uniswap's predefined market rules.

In contrast, V4 changes focused on three aspects:

• Singleton architecture. Previously, each trading pool was an independent contract, which made creation and invocation costly. V4 unifies all pools under a PoolManager main contract. The direct result is a significant decrease in the cost of creating new pools and a simplified process for interactions between multiple pools.
• Flash Accounting. In past trading processes, funds often needed to be repeatedly transferred in and out between different pools. V4 changes this by first recording interim states and then settling them all at once. In simple terms, it reduces the repetitive transfers and settlement steps in complex trades, making operations like multi-pool routing, inter-pool arbitrage, and composite market-making more efficient.
• Hooks. A Hook can be understood as an external logic segment attached to the trading pool. Developers can insert their own rules at key points in the trading lifecycle, such as before the pool opens, before and after adding liquidity, before and after swaps, and before and after withdrawing liquidity. This is the biggest difference between V4 and previous versions; trading pools are no longer just places for passive trade matching but are becoming market containers that developers can modify.

For example, a pool can set special trading rules in its early stages; it can allocate trading fees to LPs, project treasuries, or for automatic buybacks in specific proportions; and it can dynamically adjust rates based on market volatility. Further, trades themselves can trigger complex actions like minting, burning, NFT generation, and accumulating points. Therefore, while the first two upgrades of V4 focused more on improving base efficiency, Hooks truly changed the boundaries of asset issuance and trading mechanisms. It transformed Uniswap from just a trading venue into a development platform capable of hosting new asset mechanisms.

1.3 From lifecycle hooks to custom pricing

The V4 white paper listed 8 lifecycle insertion points:

beforeInitialize / afterInitializebeforeAddLiquidity / afterAddLiquiditybeforeRemoveLiquidity / afterRemoveLiquiditybeforeSwap / afterSwap

Plus a set of donate hooks, totaling over a dozen. The significance of these hook points is not just that trading pools can do more things but that they open the state machine of the pools to developers.

Moreover, V4 also allows NoOp (No-Operation) Hooks in conjunction with returnDelta. Developers can replace Uniswap's native AMM mathematical formula to a certain extent, define their own pricing curves, and let PoolManager complete the settlement according to this logic. This renders Uniswap V4 not just a DEX; it more resembles a development platform capable of hosting financial primitives.

Another key constraint to note is that hook addresses will be bound during pool initialization and cannot be changed thereafter. Once launched, the rules are locked. This is both the source of the asset credibility of hooks and explains why the SATO "white paper was rewritten overnight" incident sparked controversy.

1.4 Why didn't it catch fire in 2025?

During the week V4 went live, market attention was primarily focused on the aftershocks of Trump memecoin and AI assets like ai16z and Virtual. In contrast, V4 lacked sufficiently strong trading hotspots; although the developer circle paid attention to V4, ordinary users had no significant perception.

In the following months, the Uniswap Foundation-led UHI (Uniswap Hook Incubator) cultivated hundreds of Hook developers. By the end of April 2026, the official Uniswap GitHub hooklist repository included a total of 180 hook projects, including Zora, Flaunch, Clanker, etc., which were designed around the issuance and trading lifecycle. The issue is that these kinds of projects mainly serve launchpads, creator coin issuance, or team coin issuance processes; ordinary users do not have strong perceptions of the underlying Hook itself. They solve the problem of "how to issue and manage assets more efficiently," rather than making retail investors intuitively realize what new gameplay V4 Hook could bring.

It wasn't until the end of April 2026 that uPEG emerged.

Infrastructure itself is hard to spread; what can easily be discussed in the market are often tradable, displayable assets that can create price volatility. On the hooklist, most of the 180 projects are infrastructure and launchpads. However, uPEG's significance lies in its first consumer-friendly and tradable format, allowing ordinary users to visually see what V4 Hook can do.

Looking back over these 15 months, what Hooks lacked might not have been the toolchain or security but a market-tradable, discussable, and communicable asset carrier, and uPEG fulfills that role.

But if we look deeper, we find that what V4 Hook really raised was not the efficiency of issuing coins but the threshold for mechanism design. In the past two cycles, the market has been standardizing the issuance of coins more and more, resulting in anyone being able to issue them, but quickly leading to homogeneous supply. Hook goes in the opposite direction. It no longer rewards "who can issue coins first" but re-rewards "who can write price, behavior, liquidity, and time into the same system." In a way, the market has never lacked tools for issuing coins; what it lacks is a genius dev who can write mechanisms.

2. Four paths of hooks: side effects, pricing, loops, and entry

To understand this wave of Hook assets, it is key to see which layer the Hook intervenes in within the trading lifecycle. Based on the intervention location, the currently hot assets within the ecosystem can roughly be divided into four paths: post-trade side effect triggers, pricing logic takeover, NFT economic loops, and AI entry triggers.

2.1 Side effect trigger (afterSwap)

Representative projects: uPEG, $horn

This implementation method is relatively restrained, with AMM pricing itself unchanged, and the hook only triggers additional actions after the swap is completed.

[user swap ETH for uPEG] ↓ [V4 PoolManager calculates according to standard AMM] ↓ [afterSwap hook triggers] ↓ Check if the holding crosses integer thresholds if crossed → Call SVG renderer, generate a graphic, mint NFT if reversed → burn corresponding NFT

The challenge of this path lies more in visual and on-chain generation logic. Developers need to devise an on-chain image renderer that fits within the EVM gas budget, while pricing, liquidity, and slippage still follow Uniswap's standard path. Thus, it is also the type of hook that is easiest to integrate with existing assets.

2.2 Pricing engine takeover (beforeSwap + returnDelta)

• Representative project: $SATO

This is a more aggressive use. The hook takes over the process before the swap enters the PoolManager, replacing the AMM pricing with its custom curve.

[user swap ETH for SATO] ↓ [beforeSwap hook takes over] ↓ Price according to the hook's built-in exponential bonding curve ↓ The hook holds reserves, sells via its route, directly burns token, transfers ETH from reserves to PoolManager's route, and returns it to the seller ↓ [returnDelta tells PoolManager to skip native pricing]

The key point of this path is that the hook no longer just adds a side effect to the swap but directly participates in pricing. The SATO price seen by users is derived from the bonding curve integrated into the hook, not calculated by traditional AMMs.

2.3 On-chain NFT economic layer (voiding & revival)

• Representative project: Slonks / $SLOP

This is a more complex design. Slonks does not merely bind NFT and tokens together but creates a system that allows for conversion between the two.

Users can break down a Slonks NFT into $SLOP tokens or burn a certain amount of $SLOP to exchange a Slonks NFT back into the system. To keep this system running, the Hook collects a portion of fees on $SLOP transactions and uses these fees to buy back Slonks NFTs on the secondary market, replenishing inventory within the system.

The imaginative space of this path lies in that it does not necessarily only serve new projects. In theory, existing NFT collections can also integrate similar Hook mechanisms externally, transforming originally static NFTs into an economic system with token liquidity and buyback logic. Therefore, older PFP projects could become potential testing grounds for such mechanisms.

2.4 Account abstraction + AI entry

• Representative project: $SHIT

This is a combinatorial experiment of V4 Hook, EIP-7702, and AI Agents. The $SHIT that launched on May 9 is the first to complete this entire chain.

Strictly speaking, it is not a completely new Hook mechanism. Its novelty lies in that the programmability of the Hook no longer stays only at the contract level but extends to the user entry level: users do not need to click front-end buttons directly or manually call the contract; rather, they trigger on-chain actions through an AI dialogue.

Comparing these four paths, it is not difficult to understand why Hook assets exhibit such different forms.

Some projects allow transactions to trigger additional minting, some rewrite pricing curves, some create circular systems for fees, NFT inventory, and token liquidity, while others simply change the transaction entry from a web button to an AI dialogue box.

Hook assets are no longer simply "a token on a DEX"; they more resemble an on-chain program with an asset shell: the transaction is just the entry point; what is truly being bought, sold, discussed, and communicated is the set of mechanisms written into the Hook.

2.5 Hook pulls competition back to mechanism design

When looking at these categories of Hook assets together, one obvious change is that market competition has started to shift from "who tells a better story" back to "who writes better mechanisms." In the past round, products like pump.fun lowered the bar for issuing coins to extremely low levels, resulting in explosive asset supply, rapid attention dilution, and ultimately everyone competing over names, images, and dissemination efficiency. The significance of V4 Hook is exactly the opposite; it did not continue to lower the bar but instead pulled competition back to mechanism design itself. Who can write structures that truly differ, can drive user behavior, and can enable self-dissemination is who is more likely to win out.

This is also why tokenomics has always been a field where DeFi native players excel. Truly skilled developers never just create a token but rather a market device that induces behavior, reallocates liquidity, and alters holding paths. Total supply, allocation, and unlocks are merely the surface layer; the deeper part involves what behaviors to reward, which to punish, how prices discover at different stages, and which users are forced to make choices at different times. Hooks pull back together what was previously scattered across tokens, front-ends, and operations into the trading pool itself.

If the previous market's scarcities were traffic and narrative, then along the Hook line, the commodity that has become scarce again is another older thing: genius developers. Because when coin issuance tools become widely available to everyone, what truly determines asset longevity and upper limits will revert to the hardest-to-replicate mechanism design.

3. Token-coin conversion is not a new narrative; will this time be different?

Many people’s first reaction to uPEG's gameplay is: "Isn't this just the ERC-404 wave of Pandora in 2024?" However, from ERC-721 to ERC-404, and then to V4 Hook, there is actually an evolving path of asset standards and trading entry.

3.1 The first stage (2017-2023): ERC-721

Each token has an ID, without an economic layer or mint-burn mechanism. All trading activities occur in secondary markets, with no feedback from the contract itself.

This stage lasted about five years, from CryptoPunks, BAYC, to Azuki, Doodles, and Moonbirds. PFP project teams primarily monetized through royalties and community operations, while the contracts themselves remained relatively static. This is also why, when markets like OpenSea stopped enforcing royalties, many NFT projects’ business models came under rapid pressure.

3.2 The second stage (2024): ERC-404 / Pandora

On February 2, 2024, Pandora went live on Ethereum. It was not a VC coin or team token, opening at $230 and soaring to $32,000 just six days later, with a weekly increase of 12,000%.

The mechanism was as follows:

• A total of 10,000 ERC-20 tokens corresponding to 10,000 Replicant NFTs
• Holding 1 complete token = holding 1 Replicant
• Buying the 1st token mints a new Replicant for you from the contract
• Selling (holding less than 1) destroys that Replicant
• Buying back after selling → re-mints, but the number and rarity will be randomly reassigned—this is the well-known "reroll" gameplay

The community once repeatedly traded to refresh the rarity of Replicants, hoping to reroll more rare NFTs. However, ERC-404 exposed two core issues at that time:

• It was not a formally approved EIP standard. The Pandora team combined both ERC-20 and ERC-721 interfaces within one contract to achieve the effect of having the same asset possess both token and NFT attributes, but this approach did not belong to a mature standard. Infrastructure like wallets, cross-chain bridges, and aggregators faced identification and interaction issues when trying to accommodate such assets.
• High gas costs. Every transaction could be associated with ERC-721's mint or burn operations, causing the gas fees for a single swap to often reach dozens of dollars.

By the second half of 2024, DN-404 emerged, attempting to solve this problem in a more engineered way. It split ERC-20 and ERC-721 into two contracts while maintaining synchronization through a mirror relationship, thereby reducing gas costs and improving compatibility.

However, by this time, the market's enthusiasm for "token-coin integration" had noticeably waned. The high gas costs, compatibility issues, and the impression of excessive speculation left by ERC-404 quickly turned this direction from a new narrative into a short-cycle hotspot.

3.3 The third stage (2026): V4 Hook

The core problem of ERC-404 was its attempt to switch back and forth between the two independent standards of ERC-20 and ERC-721. Although this created the effect of "token-coin integration," it introduced complex state management and unstable infrastructure compatibility.

V4 Hook takes a different approach. Instead of reinventing a new asset standard, it transforms the action of swapping itself into a programmable entry. The generation, destruction, pricing, and additional logic of assets do not necessarily have to be written in the token contract but can instead be embedded in the Hook logic of the trading pool.

Thus, the significant differences between V4 Hook and ERC-404 can be viewed from three dimensions:

First, whether NFTs are pre-existing or generated during the transaction.

The Replicant NFTs in Pandora are closer to preset assets. The metadata for 10,000 Replicants was determined at the project's launch, with transactions triggering minting, burning, or re-randomizing of NFTs.

The logic of uPEG is different. Its 24×24 pixel design is not prepared in advance. When a user purchases and triggers an afterSwap, the Hook generates a random seed based on user addresses, transaction parameters, etc., and hands it over to an on-chain SVG renderer to render an SVG image in real-time.

Second, where the images and metadata are attached.

The images and metadata of Pandora mainly rely on IPFS or external storage. Although IPFS is more resistant to censorship compared to centralized servers, it still depends on the continued accessibility of external files.

uPEG further writes the SVG rendering logic into the on-chain contract. As long as Ethereum is operational, the image can be re-rendered.

Slonks takes it a step further. It stores a 22.7 KB transformer model directly in the Ethereum mainnet contract, splitting the weights into 9 parts, saved using the SSTORE2 pattern in several null function contracts. Every minting or merging triggers a computation within EVM to generate an SVG image on the spot. In contrast, the trading pools of the V3 era struggled to accommodate such computation and generation logic.

Third, where the economic mechanisms are written.

In ERC-404 projects like Pandora, tokenomics is primarily written in the token contract, while Uniswap pools simply provide a trading space.

However, in V4 Hook assets, the economic mechanisms can be directly written into the Hook. The upper limits on SATO's supply and minting rules, SLOP's logic for NFT and token conversion, and the minting mechanism of $horn based on "ETH input × holding time" fundamentally depend on Hook execution. Just looking at the token contract often will not reveal the true mechanism design.

Thus, ERC-404 resembles stitching together two standards, "token" and "NFT"; V4 Hook transforms "trading" itself into the entry for generating assets and triggering mechanisms. The former addresses asset form combination, while the latter changes how asset mechanisms are triggered, moving from token-as-asset to swap-as-genesis.

4. Anticipated next wave: A "second spring" for old NFT projects

If uPEG/SATO/Slonks/Horn, etc. are the first half of this Hook story, the next wave that has not been fully discussed but is worth tracking is whether old NFT projects can add a new economic mechanism for themselves through V4 Hook.

Most old NFT projects remain stuck in the pure ERC-721 stage. Their contracts typically only support minting, transferring, and burning, lacking economic logic associated with trading behaviors. As royalty gradually becomes ineffective in markets like OpenSea, many projects can only rely on community operations, brand activities, and new narratives to maintain engagement.

V4 Hook provides another option: it does not change the existing NFT holding forms or force holders to migrate but instead integrates a new layer of Hook economic logic externally, allowing old assets to reconnect contractually with trading behaviors.

This path is not entirely without examples. Slonks, uPEG, and SATO have already validated different directions of Hook gameplay on-chain. The true challenge may not necessarily be technical implementation but economic model design, as well as whether project teams are willing to acknowledge the need for new asset mechanisms to supplement old models.

However, for NFT projects, accessing the Hook economic layer is not merely a technical choice. It signifies a shift from "art collection" toward "financial assets." This is not a minor cultural change, and not all teams will accept it.

Different Hook paradigms also have different adaptability to old NFT projects. The "transaction-triggered generation" path of uPEG needs to rewrite visual generation logic, making it unfriendly to old projects; SATO's "Hook takes over pricing" model is more suitable for new asset issuance and is not appropriate for directly applying to existing NFTs. In comparison, Slonks's design, which revolves around NFT inventory, token liquidity, and fee buyback to create loops, may be more suited for older PFP projects. The path of $horn, which incorporates holding time into the asset generation logic, also presents opportunities to reward long-term holders.

When this path will truly establish itself depends on whether the first influential old NFT project is willing to take the initiative to try. For those following V4 Hook, it may also be a good direction to focus attention on those old PFPs that still have communities and brands but have yet to complete mechanism transformations, rather than merely chasing newly emerged assets.

5. Will V4 Hook bring a new cycle?

From a longer cyclical perspective, there has been a recurring clue in crypto history: when the methods for asset issuance change, it often brings about a new trading cycle.

In 2017, ERC-20 and ICO lowered the barrier for issuing coins from "needing to issue a new chain" to "writing a contract"; in 2021, ERC-721 and OpenSea standardized NFT issuance and trading, ushering in NFT Summer; in 2023, BRC-20 and Ordinals connected scarcity and inscriptions on the BTC chain, creating a new secondary market; in 2024, pump.fun again lowered the coin issuance threshold from "knowing how to write contracts" to "knowing how to type."

A commonality in these previous changes is the continuous lowering of issuance thresholds. Issuing coins has become increasingly simple, participation easier, and asset supply increasingly inflated.

V4 Hook takes another path. It did not continue to lower barriers but instead raised the developer threshold while simultaneously opening up higher spaces for mechanism expression. It liberated tokenomics from a static contract, allowing the trading pool itself to become part of the asset mechanism.

In a certain sense, this is a response from Uniswap after pump.fun seized a significant amount of coin issuance attention. Rather than competing to make issuance easier, it shifted the focus to: who can write more creative and harder-to-replicate asset mechanisms.

Hooks may not be able to independently initiate a full-blown bull market. They are heavy, the barriers are high, and the requirements for developers are greater, making it difficult to spread widely among ordinary users in a short time like pump.fun.

However, they have the potential to become a more "mechanism-rich" track in the next round of cycles. They serve not the largest group of players but those willing to study contracts, understand mechanisms, and bear early risks.

6. What should ordinary users pay attention to?

For ordinary users, participating in Hook assets first requires an awareness of one change: in the V4 era, the true mechanisms may not be written in the token contract but instead in the Hook contract.

In the past, when assessing a new coin, the focus often revolved around whether transfers had taxes, blacklists, or minting authority. However, in Hook assets, minting, burning, pricing curves, fee allocations, NFT generation, and even self-destruct mechanisms may all be hidden inside the Hook logic. Reading only the token contract may not reveal the actual risks.

SATO is a typical case. Its buying and selling do not strictly follow the same price path and, added with a dual tax, users who interpret it through conventional AMM intuition may easily underestimate mechanism losses.

Therefore, when participating in Hook assets, at least several things should be kept in mind: first, examine the Hook contract before buying rather than just the token contract; second, confirm whether buying and selling feature dual pricing tracks; third, ensure that the position matches the pool's liquidity; early pools are often thin, and a slightly large sell order could cause notable price fluctuations; fourth, do not equate technological innovations with market fairness; Hooks address developer expressiveness but do not eliminate bundling and ambush.

7. Conclusion

Returning to the initial questions: why V4 Hook? Why now?

V4 Hook has been live since January 2025. It has a toolchain, a security audit, and developers cultivated by an incubator alongside registered Hook projects. Yet at that time, it did not form a genuine market热点. The reason is rather straightforward; most users were still immersed in the low-barrier issuance logic of pump.fun. Since a coin can be issued in seconds, why spend weeks writing a Hook?

However, as the issuance of Solana memes became increasingly inward-looking and the homogeneity brought on by low thresholds became more severe, the notion of "spending weeks writing a Hook" began to seem meaningful once more. A higher engineering threshold has begun to become part of the scarcity of mechanisms themselves.

This has formed a fascinating cycle: pump.fun lowered the issuance threshold to extremely low levels, leading to a rapid expansion of meme assets; after an excess of asset supply, some players began to look for harder-to-replicate and more scarce mechanisms; thus, the market turned back to V4 Hook that had been cold for 16 months.

New market opportunities often appear not at the peak of enthusiasm but before mainstream attention shifts, before a unified narrative takes shape, and first emerges from the underlying code. V4 Hook waited 16 months to see the first batch of assets that truly brought it to the market. uPEG was the first widely discussed example, Slonks demonstrated the possibilities of on-chain generation and NFT economic loops, SATO pushed the Hook pricing takeover to the extreme, SHIT combined the AI entry, EIP-7702, and Hook, and horn began experimenting with including a time dimension directly into asset generation logic.

However, these may still not be the true end of this line. If V4 Hook continues to advance, the next batch worth watching may not only be new memes or generative art assets but also old NFT projects, on-chain gaming assets, or even trading entries for AI agents. Whether there will be someone to take the initiative to integrate the Hook economic layer in old PFPs remains to be observed.

However, it is undeniable that V4 Hook is transitioning from a developer innovative experiment to an entry point for new asset mechanisms to enter the market. What it has truly raised is not issuing efficiency but the threshold of mechanism design. The market does not lack assets; it lacks genius devs who know how to write mechanisms. Whoever can truly combine price, behavior, liquidity, and time into a functioning set of mechanisms is more likely to define the next stage of this narrative.

Note: This article is for research and information sharing purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice. The price fluctuations of Hook-related assets mentioned in the text can be significant; please thoroughly assess your own risk tolerance before participating.