Curry, Shenchao TechFlow
Still FOMOing over Slonk, the hot Ethereum on-chain project from yesterday? Actually, a new narrative has arrived:
V4 Hook.
Over the past two weeks, Uniswap V4's Hook mechanism suddenly caught fire. SATO used Hooks to create an on-chain bonding curve, pushing its market cap to $40 million. uPEG rode the viral story of an unused Uniswap name draft to over $30 million in two weeks. Slonks crammed an AI model into a smart contract to mimic CryptoPunks, achieving 586 ETH in trading volume six days after launch.
Although these three projects have different playstyles, they all leverage Uniswap's V4 mechanism.
Now the fourth one is here.
The new project is called $UORE, launched just yesterday. In one sentence, what it does is: Packaging on-chain mining, token-buying lottery, pixel NFT auto-generation, and a deflationary burn mechanism all into a single Uniswap V4 trading pool.
Because when you buy tokens in this pool, the contract will execute the aforementioned six things in the background simultaneously, the gas fee for one transaction is two to three times that of a regular swap...
Currently, if you open CT, you'll see everyone complaining about this high gas.
Regarding the token, according to GMGN data at the time of writing, $UORE reached a market cap of $1.2 million within hours of launch, then quickly dropped to $440k. The pool liquidity is only $64k, but the 24-hour trading volume is $1.2 million, meaning the money in the pool has turned over nearly twenty times.
However, there are only 741 holders, with a total supply of less than ten thousand tokens.
Currently, the risk appears extremely high. After some preliminary research, I personally think it's the most complex mechanism-wise among the V4 Hook ecosystem projects (the recent wave of new on-chain plays tends to make their mechanisms hard to understand...).
It is simultaneously a token, an NFT collection, a staking mine, and a lottery system. Moreover, these four things aren't independent; they are welded together.
Four-in-One Mine
For most NFT projects, the token and the NFT are separate things, bought and sold separately.
UORE is different. Its NFT is called Oreling, a 32×32 pixel miner character, embedded directly within the token. For every whole integer UORE token you hold in your wallet, you automatically have one corresponding Oreling.
The contract mints it for you when you buy tokens, burns it when you sell, and the Oreling moves with the token when transferred. You cannot buy an Oreling separately, nor can you detach it from UORE.
The traits of each Oreling are determined by the hash of the next block at the moment of minting. This means you don't know what kind of character you'll get when buying, not even the validators can see the result beforehand.
The differences between these characters aren't just about looks.
Each Oreling has a Class (rarity) and a Hash (a random number from 1 to 100). Multiplying the two gives its Mining Power.
The most common Mortal makes up 60% with a 1x multiplier; the rarest God has only a 1% chance with a 5x multiplier. If you're lucky and mint a God with Hash 100, its power is 500, over ten times that of a common miner.
What's the use of mining power? Classic play: staking.
Stake your Oreling into the mine pool, and you start receiving a share of the daily UORE release proportional to your mining power. According to the project's whitepaper, 1000 UORE are released on the first day, then decaying by 1% daily, with a half-life of roughly 69 days. 80% of the release goes to stakers, 20% goes into the Motherlode prize pool.
This decay rate means 97% of the total emissions will be released within a year. The earlier you enter the mining game, the bigger your share of the pie.
There's a noteworthy design when claiming rewards: a 10% "refining tax" is deducted and redistributed to all stakers who haven't claimed yet. The whitepaper calls this the refined-ore boost.
In plain terms, those who claim later eat more of the taxes paid by others. People in a hurry to withdraw are subsidizing the patient ones.
Then there's the Motherlode, which translates to "lode prize".
Every time you buy UORE worth ≥ 0.1 ETH through the official channel, you automatically get a lottery ticket. The winning probability is linked to the purchase amount: 0.1 ETH gives about a 1/600 chance, 0.5 ETH about 1/200, and 1 ETH caps at 1/100. Buying over 1 ETH doesn't increase the probability further, preventing whales from farming chances.
If you win, the prize pool is split in half: 50% goes directly to the buyer, and 50% is randomly distributed to one staker (weighted by mining power). As of writing, there have only been 4 wins historically, with the largest prize being 6.4 UORE.
Finally, the deflationary flywheel.
Buying incurs a 1% tax directly burned, selling incurs a 1% tax sent to a buyback treasury. When the treasury accumulates 0.1 ETH, anyone can trigger an automatic buyback, and the bought-back UORE are all burned. As of writing, 58 buybacks have been executed, cumulatively burning 358 UORE.
Looking at the entire design, it's a minor innovation in token-NFT play, an old trick for creating scarcity, yet another Ponzi in economic model design.
The Project's Code is Forked, Its Playstyle is Frankensteined
UORE wasn't written from scratch.
People in the community looked at the source code and found a folder named `reference/unipeg-hook-source/`. The founder, Noah, didn't hide it either. He directly stated on Twitter that UORE's contracts are forked from uPEG, and that he fixed two known issues with uPEG: duplicate NFT generation and flash loan attacks for farming rarity.
A quick look at this founder's profile shows a bio: "Ethereum dev & BAYC holder". On May 2nd, he tweeted his first post about UORE, saying the project combines the mining concept from Solana's ORE with the V4 Hook architecture of uPEG.
He also proactively @ mentioned Unicurvefun and Openpeg, asking if they could support Orelings trading once their markets go live.
From this public information, UORE's lineage is clear:
Solana ORE provided the "on-chain mining + lottery" gameplay template, uPEG provided the V4 Hook code skeleton, and Noah made improvements and assembled on top of these two.
Forking itself isn't the issue. I think the current problems are:
- Gas. There are reports on CT that each UORE transaction requires the Hook to execute six steps, consuming two to three times the gas of a normal swap. Swapping back and forth might leave little to no profit.
- Time window. The V4 Hook narrative was affected by uPEG's price drop, and subsequent projects will likely have lower ceilings. UORE is the fourth project in this wave of Hook hype, with the heat from the first three already cooling. The attention window for this sector waits for no one.
- Complexity. UORE is probably the most mechanically dense among these four projects. For an average user to understand the whole set of rules—Oreling rarity, mining power calculation, staking decay, refining tax, Motherlode probability, buyback trigger conditions—the barrier is high, and the official website is cryptic.
And the project's whitepaper is also interesting:
Read the contracts and understand the mechanics before deploying capital.
Translated into Chinese, this roughly means "Understand it first, don't blame me if you don't."
Combining insights from previous Hook projects, we can see this wave of on-chain trends features complex mechanism designs + massive information asymmetry. They have alpha potential, but the shelf life of that alpha is getting shorter.
SATO gave you a week, uPEG gave you a few days, and by the time it's UORE's turn, the time you have to understand the rules might be down to just a few hours...
By the time you understand it, the market move might be over.
