If people in your group chats aren't discussing $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks yet, you might need to find some new groups.

When Slonks launched, its mint price was less than 0.004 ETH, equivalent to under 70 RMB. Six days later, its floor price rose to 0.123 ETH, a 60x increase. uPEG, priced at $982 per unit, went from 0 to a market cap of $34.44 million in two weeks. When SATO's market cap dropped below $3 million, someone directly bought the bottom through the on-chain bonding curve, opening a position of 260,000 SATO in one go. Its market cap later surged to $40 million, resulting in a floating profit of $360,000.

These are not your typical memecoin wealth narratives. They all point to the same sector: Uniswap V4 Hook. In just two and a half weeks, these three projects dragged the entire V4 hook sector from being an "internal toy for DeFi geeks" into the mainstream spotlight. Related reading: "Bull Market Bets on New Coins, Could the 'Hook' Concept Be the Sector to Start the Bull Run?"

For retail investors who didn't get in early on $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks, how can we seize the next potential wealth opportunity? Before discussing that, we need to briefly review how the V4 Hook narrative caught fire.

How Did the V4 Hook Narrative Catch Fire?

Before V3, Uniswap was a money exchange counter. You swap ETH for USDC, the price follows x*y=k, done. After V4, the "hook" was embedded into the swap lifecycle, allowing anyone to insert their own code at the moment before or after a swap, or when adding liquidity.

In fact, Uniswap v4 was launched as early as January 30th of last year. But it wasn't until the recent emergence of projects like $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks that hooks sparked widespread discussion among the retail player community.

SATO was the first among these three to gain traction, launching around mid-April, roughly a week before uPEG. But it didn't have KOLs to ignite it, nor heavyweights like Adam Hollander endorsing it. Its spread was closer to the degen circles. Keywords like "pure on-chain", "fair launch", "no team allocation", and "contract runs itself" directly attracted V4 geeks and bonding curve veterans.

The real explosion point for the V4 Hook narrative was Unipeg (UPEG). The name "Unipeg" was born with a strong commemorative meaning for Uniswap, giving it inherent narrative and attention from the start.

In 2019, Hayden Adams posted a blog titled "Uniswap Birthday Blog—V0", where he recalled that when naming the Uniswap protocol, he originally wanted to call it "Unipeg", a combination of Unicorn and Pegasus. But Vitalik took a look and said, "Unipeg? That sounds more like Uniswap." So Hayden settled on Uniswap.

"Uniswap" replaced "Unipeg" and became the name of the $70 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 new meaning: Uni + JPEG = uPEG. The NFT circle has long jokingly called pictures "JPEGs". Since this thing was born in a Uniswap pool, it's Uniswap's JPEG.

This story itself is viral material. It perfectly merges four narratives into one name: Hayden's personal anecdote, Vitalik's offhand remark, NFT circle lingo, and V4's new mechanism.

The "uPEG" story is easy to tell and spread. It attracted OpenSea CMO Adam Hollander, who tweeted on April 25th: "Interested in this concept, buying a little to try it out."

That night, "uPEG" tripled in price. Then Uniswap team member niko followed up, and Ouroboros co-founder Nafay and meme coin KOL pow also posted their uPEG holdings on X. In two weeks, uPEG went from 0 to a $34.44 million market cap, with a unit price of $982. Related reading: "Market Cap Breaks $23 Million, Hitting New Highs, What's the Magic of the New Picture Gem Unipeg?"

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

Developer Hirsch did something that sounds counterintuitive: he directly embedded an AI image generation model (only 214KB, about the size of a low-resolution phone wallpaper) into an Ethereum smart contract. This model's task was to replicate 10,000 CryptoPunks.

But a 214KB model can't remember 10,000 faces. With 576 pixels per image, the model would misdraw about 24 pixels on average, roughly a 4% distortion rate. Only 32 out of 10,000 were perfectly replicated; the rest were all "warped punks."

Hirsch called these misdrawn pixels "slop." Then he tweeted the project's philosophy: "The slop is not a bug. It is the medium."

The entire economic model is built on "the more mistakes, the more valuable." Two Slonks of the same level can be merged, burning one to upgrade another; the new image's slop only increases. Any Slonk can be sent to the void to mint the future $SLOP token (not officially launched yet) at a 1:1 ratio based on its slop count. Every action is completed through a V4 hook, verifiable on-chain.

Slonks wasn't an immediate hit. In its first few days, it was almost ignored under the spotlight of uPEG's $30 million market cap. The floor price hovered around 0.005 ETH, with little discussion on OpenSea. It wasn't until NFT circle veterans like 798 took to X, one after another, turning "misdrawing is art" into a shareable meme, coupled with further smart money moves on-chain, subsequent promotion by KOLs and media, and OpenSea's homepage trending section distributing traffic for it, that Slonks saw a 60x increase in 5 days.

But the significance of SATO lies in its foundational proof that "V4 hooks can create new economic models." This was the prerequisite for the emergence of uPEG and Slonks later.

uPEG's significance was translating the DeFi concept of V4 hooks for the NFT community. Retail investors suddenly realized hooks weren't just toys for DeFi geeks; they could create things they also wanted to buy.

Slonks built upon the attention dividend created by uPEG, crafting an even stronger story hook and an interesting economic model, further propelling the V4 Hook narrative.

What to Focus on to Seize the Next Opportunity?

For the foreign V4 Hook inner circle, our editors mainly recommend following these users:

1. Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams), Founder of Uniswap. Importance goes without saying.

2. saucepoint (@saucepoint), The "hook godfather" of the Uniswap Foundation, author of v4-template. Almost all hook projects start from his template code.

3. Uniswap official (@Uniswap) and Uniswap Foundation (@UniswapFND). The weekly Builder Update (Wednesday or Thursday) is the most important official signal source for the sector.

4. niko (@niko_eth), Member of Uniswap Labs team. You could say he was a key baton in the first wave of KOL relays for uPEG.

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

6. Adam Hollander (@AdamHollander), CMO of OpenSea. His deeper background is as an early ecosystem driver for Hashmasks and Pudgy Penguins, a key translator bridging this wave from DeFi to NFT circles.

7. Project official accounts: uPEG official (@unipegv4), Unimon official (@unimonapp), Slonks official account, SATO official (@Satothedog). See who they follow and interact with; it often helps unearth the next hook project that hasn't been highlighted yet.

Besides that, we can also pay attention to some websites related to V4 hooks and Uniswap:

1. HookRank.io is currently the cleanest V4 hook explorer, with 1300+ hooks listed, sorted by TVL/Volume/Fees, featuring "New" and "Trending" tags. This is the first stop to see hooks that have seen rising data but haven't been mentioned on Twitter yet.

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

3. Uniswap Foundation Builder Update is published on the blog . The Foundation releases one every Wednesday or Thursday. Any core user following the Uniswap ecosystem won't miss the hottest narratives.

4. Unichain Infinite Hackathon competition. Award-winning projects are almost always seeds; we can focus on core projects on Unichain.

5. Dune Uniswap V4 Tracker. Shows total hook count, TVL distribution, chain volume distribution.

6. Dexscreener needs little introduction, a commonly used charting site for trading, useful for monitoring newly created V4 pairs, an early signal source for projects not yet ignited by KOLs. For example, when uPEG's holder addresses jumped from 200 to 4000+ within 24 hours, that slope itself was a signal.

7. OpenSea + Magic Eden Trending lists. Slonks appeared on OpenSea Trending the day after launch, something ordinary NFT projects need weeks of marketing to achieve. Meanwhile, on May 8th, Slonks's daily trading volume of 575 ETH surpassed CryptoPunks' 129 ETH. Any new project's daily volume exceeding CryptoPunks' during the same period is a sector-level signal.

8. The awesome-uniswap-hooks GitHub project. All experimental hook projects are registered here, suitable for discovering early-stage projects with "interesting designs" that don't yet have tokens.

The Next Stage of the V4 Hook Narrative

Here's our (irresponsible) speculation. If the V4 Hook narrative doesn't immediately fizzle out, it will likely progress along three lines in order of time: short-term is SATO's bug fix plays, medium-term is hook composability, and long-term is Unichain becoming the center of the entire sector.

First, the short-term SATO bug fix plays, which you can see discussed in various group chats today.

The reason SATO spawned a "fix play" like sat1 lies in its hook contract. Any V4 hook that wants to replace Uniswap's standard pricing must maintain its own ledger of "how much money is in the pool" to calculate its own curve formula. But Uniswap's PoolManager also maintains a ledger of the real balance. Two ledgers exist simultaneously, requiring synchronization with each swap. If the sync logic isn't written rigorously, the two numbers will drift apart. In hook engineering circles, this is called dual-state drift.

Drift creates arbitrage opportunities. At some point, the hook internally thinks 1 SATO should be worth X ETH, but the pool's actual reserves show Y ETH. Whoever spots this difference first gets to exploit it. Those two addresses with $360k floating profit weren't buying market sentiment; they were buying an accounting loophole in the contract.

sat1 packages itself as "one curve, single state," using only one ledger, no drift. The engineering fix is reasonable, but narratively, it's calculated—it tells retail "SATO has a bug, I'm the correct version," aiming to capture legitimacy.

This playbook isn't new to V4. Bitcoin ecosystem had ORDI, SATS, 1000SATS; ERC-404 era had Pandora, DN404, ERC-404 V2; pump.fun era had BankrFun, ClankerFun. Every later entrant claimed to "fix the previous one's problems."

The essence of a bugfix play isn't technical repair; it's narrative usurpation. It doesn't even need to actually fix anything; it just needs the consensus on Twitter that "the original has a bug," and liquidity will shift from the original to the new one.

V4 hooks have lowered the cost of this script to an unprecedented level. Hooks are open-source; fork one, change three lines of code, and deploy. Every successful hook project comes with its own fork generator. SATO/sat1 is the first template pair; uPEG2, Slinks will follow—it's inevitable.

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

Currently in V4, a pool can only have one hook attached. But people are already working on "meta-hooks," where one hook internally calls multiple sub-hooks, enabling combined behaviors.

Once this works, it means uPEG's image generation + Slonks's NFT-token conversion + SATO's bonding curve could all exist simultaneously in the same pool. One swap could trigger image generation, rewrite the pricing curve, and mint an NFT all at once.

Possible directions are numerous: swap triggers music or audio generation (replace SVG with MIDI; audio spreads more easily than images); swap as identity or reputation system (each swap updates soul-bound points); prediction market hook (treat swap as a betting action, Polymarket model running within LPs); time-based hook (lower sell tax the longer you hold); cross-collection fusion gameplay (use hooks to fuse Pudgy Penguin and Azuki into new forms, most feasible between CC0 projects).