Whitelist Paper 2.0, Two-State Fork, Imitation Project Emergence: What Happened to Sato Overnight?

Original author: KarenZ, Foresight News

On the evening of May 7, 2026, amid market skepticism regarding the pricing drift of sato within Curve and its divergence from the secondary market price, the sato official website has updated its whitepaper entry to "whitepaper 2.0," and the front-end trading panel has been changed from "buy/sell" to "mint/burn."

This is not an ordinary revision of wording. Comparing version 1.0 with 2.0, it is evident that the focus of the overnight rewrite was not on sentiment or narrative, but on clarifying market understanding of how sato is actually traded, under what circumstances it is burned, and why the price on the official website differs from the secondary market price.

Meanwhile, sato's market cap has fallen from a high of nearly $40 million yesterday to $14.4 million. On the other hand, the copycat project sat1 has also released its own whitepaper and front-end website. Its market cap briefly reached $10 million at midday but has since fallen to around $5.2 million.

Please be reminded that both sato and sat1 are currently in a highly volatile, sentiment-driven phase. The mechanisms may appear sophisticated, but this does not imply the market will operate as intended. No mechanism innovation can replace risk management. Participants should still make cautious decisions based on their own risk tolerance.

What Changed in the sato Whitepaper 2.0?

The core of version 1.0 described an exponential issuance curve, selfDeprecated at 99% of supply (permanent closure of the minting function), no pre-mining, no allocation, no admin role, no upgrade path, and a rule that selling leads to burning.

Version 2.0 adopts a different approach. It is broken down into multiple clear chapters: Issuance, The Pool is the Reserve, Curve Mathematics and Constraints, Minting Cessation, Trading Phases, Routing and Trading Options.

A very important addition in the new version is the explicit inclusion of sato's three core formulas within Curve:

• The minted supply when cumulative ETH is e: q(e) = K · (1 − e^(−e/S)), where K = 21,000,000, S = 500 ETH
• The single token price at position e: p(e) = (S / K) · e^(e/S)
• ETH return when current supply is q and burning amount is b: Δe(q, b) = S · ln((K − q + b) / (K − q))

These three formulas clearly explain the operational logic of sato's curve: the first defines how cumulative supply is generated, the second determines the price during minting, and the third determines how much ETH the curve should return during burning. In other words, sato's issuance, pricing, and redemption are not three separate logics, but three facets of the same curve.

The most important changes are as follows:

First, Version 2.0 explicitly defines the existence of a secondary market as a core part of the market structure. The bonding curve is a Uniswap V4 pool with hooks, while the sato/USDT secondary market is a separate V4 pool. Both share the PoolManager, but they 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 isolates this point to clarify: a decrease in total supply, i.e., burn, is only triggered when a user swaps sato -> ETH back through the curve pool. Conversely, if a user trades via the secondary sato/USDT pool, it is merely an AMM trade with LPs, which does not burn tokens or utilize the curve's reserve. This is crucial: only selling into the curve causes a burn.

Third, Version 2.0 incorporates "routing" into the whitepaper. The official website now clearly states that minting and burning on this site directly call the satoSwapRouter, which is forced to route through the curve pool and will not automatically switch to the secondary pool for better prices. In other words, the official front-end is not a "market best-execution agent," but a "dedicated entry point into the curve."

Fourth, the new front-end separates the three prices: market, burn, and mint. The new front-end has visually represented this difference. Based on current data from the official website, at the time of writing, the market price is approximately $0.7241, the burn price is approximately $0.7066, and the mint price is approximately $1.2. This means that currently minting through the official website's curve costs about 65% more than the secondary market price, while the burn price is very close to the secondary market price. It effectively lays out an overnight point of contention: the curve's mint price, the curve's burn price, and the secondary pool's market price are inherently different things.

Fifth, Version 2.0 revises the description of the "minting terminal line." Version 1.0 explained the minting terminal line as: 99% of K is the terminal line, approximately 20.79 million sato, corresponding to about 2302 ETH. Version 2.0 rephrases this to sound more like a "market-accessible boundary," stating "the practically reachable supply scale settles around 20.5 million sato," and adds that this reachable supply will decrease slightly as burning occurs. In other words, Version 2.0 downplays the intuition that "users will naturally push the supply to 20.79 million sato," emphasizing it as 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?

Concurrently, the copycat project sat1 has also launched a structurally similar new whitepaper and front-end website.

Their core concepts are very close:

• Both are ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum, issued directly via on-chain contracts without reliance on team custody, upgrades, governance, or admin privileges;
• Both bind minting, burning, and reserves within the same curve mechanism;
• Both employ the same type of asymptotic issuance curve: as cumulative ETH grows, new tokens become progressively harder to mint, with prices rising exponentially, approaching but never reaching the 21 million cap;
• Both charge a bilateral 0.3% friction fee, which is not paid to the team but remains within the Hook/curve;
• Both position themselves as "operator-less issuance machines," unlike traditional projects with roadmaps, upgrades, and team treasuries.

The biggest difference lies in "how state variables are recorded."

sat1 points out in its whitepaper that sato's problem is using two sets of states to drive the mechanism:

• ethCum: Cumulative ETH in the curve;
• totalMintedFair: Total minted supply in the curve.

The buy path relies more on ethCum, while selling and self-deprecation (99% threshold) rely more on totalMintedFair. Combined with the initial random multiplier stage, these two quantities no longer strictly maintain the same invariant, resulting in "one contract, two curve positions."

This can cause ethCum to move faster than totalMintedFair, with back-and-forth trading exacerbating this divergence.

In contrast, sat1's design rule is to maintain only one master state.

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

Thus, the fundamental mechanical difference is:

• sato: "State divergence" occurs in practice between issuance, exit, and mint-stop logic.
• sat1: Enforces a "unified state system," deriving all critical logic from the same curve position.

Regarding curve fees, while both charge a 0.3% fee, in sato, the whitepaper states that 0.3% is charged for each mint and burn, with the fee permanently staying in the hook. The problem is that sato simultaneously has two key states, ethCum and totalMintedFair, which diverge after the initial random multiplier. Consequently, the observed "thickening of reserves" is not solely due to the 0.3% fee but also incorporates additional deviation from state drift. In other words, the fee itself hasn't changed, but it is compounded with a state error.

In sat1:

• When buying 1.000 ETH, the mint quote is calculated based on only 0.997 ETH, but the full 1.000 ETH enters the reserve.
• When selling, the user receives 0.3% less, and the deducted ETH stays within the Hook.

This means sat1's 0.3% fee also "stays in the pool," but it is designed solely to increase the reserve without interfering with the main curve state, as all core logic recognizes only the single ethCum state.

Finally, it must be reiterated that no mechanism innovation can replace risk management. Participants should still make cautious decisions based on their own risk tolerance.