Hook Narrative Explodes: How to Seize the Next Moon-Shot Opportunity

If your group chats haven't mentioned $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks yet, you might need to find some new groups.

Slonks launched with a mint price below 0.004 ETH (less than 70 RMB), and six days later, its floor price surged to 0.123 ETH, a 60x increase. uPEG's unit price was $982, and it took just two weeks to go from zero to a $34.44 million market cap. When SATO's market cap dipped below $3 million, someone used the on-chain bonding curve to buy the dip directly, opening a position of 260,000 SATO. The market cap later soared to $40 million, generating a floating profit of $360,000 in no time.

These aren't just your typical memecoin rags-to-riches stories. They all point to one specific track: Uniswap V4 Hooks. In just two and a half weeks, these three projects pulled the entire V4 hook track from being an "internal DeFi geek toy" into the mainstream spotlight. Related reading: "In a Bull Market for New Coins, Will the 'Hook' Concept Become the Track That Ignites This Cycle?"

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

How Did the V4 Hook Narrative Catch Fire?

Before V3, Uniswap was essentially a currency exchange counter. You swapped ETH for USDC, the price followed x*y=k, and that was it. After V4, a mechanism called 'hook' was inserted into the swap lifecycle. Now, anyone can insert their own code before and after a swap, or at the moment liquidity is added.

In fact, Uniswap v4 was launched as early as January 30th last year. However, it wasn't until recent projects like $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks emerged that hooks sparked widespread discussion among retail traders.

SATO was the first of the three to take off, launching around mid-April, about a week before uPEG. But it didn't have a KOL pump or heavyweights like Adam Hollander endorsing it. Its propagation path was closer to the degen crowd. Keywords like "pure on-chain," "fair launch," "no team allocation," and "contract runs itself" directly attracted V4 geeks and bonding curve veterans.

The real explosive point for the V4 Hook narrative was Unipeg (UPEG). The name "Unipeg" carries strong commemorative significance for Uniswap, so it was born with built-in narrative and attention.

In 2019, Hayden Adams published a blog post 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 one look and said, "Unipeg? Sounds more like Uniswap." So Hayden settled on the name Uniswap.

"Uniswap" replaced "Unipeg," becoming the name of a $70 billion DeFi blue chip.

Eight years later, in April 2026, an anonymous developer (Twitter account @unipegv4, rumored to be linked to the 0xHadrian blog) picked up this discarded name and gave it new meaning: Uni + JPEG = uPEG. The NFT community has always jokingly referred to images as "JPEGs." Since this thing was born in a Uniswap pool, it became Uniswap's JPEG.

This story itself is a viral piece of content. It perfectly converges four narratives into one name: Hayden's personal anecdote, a quip from Vitalik, NFT community slang, and the new V4 mechanism.

The "uPEG" story was easy to tell and easy to spread. It caught the attention of OpenSea CMO Adam Hollander, who tweeted on April 25th: "I'm interested in this concept, going to buy a little and try it."

That night, "uPEG" tripled in price. Then niko from the Uniswap team followed suit, Ouroboros co-founder Nafay and meme coin KOL pow also posted their uPEG holdings on X. In two weeks, uPEG went from zero to a $34.44 million market cap, with a unit price of $982. Related reading: "Market Cap Breaks Through $23 Million to Reach New Highs, What Magic Does the New Image Dog Unipeg Possess?".

Meme coin KOL pow promoting uPEG

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

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

But a 214KB model couldn't remember 10,000 faces. Each image had 576 pixels; the model averaged about 24 errors, roughly a 4% distortion rate. Out of 10,000, only 32 were perfectly replicated; the rest were "distorted punks."

Example of a 'slop'

Hirsch called these incorrectly drawn pixels "slop." He then stated the project's philosophy on Twitter: "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; one is burned to upgrade the other, and the slop count of the new image only increases. Any Slonk can be sent to the void to mint future $SLOP tokens (not yet officially launched) at a 1:1 ratio based on the slop count. Every action is executed through V4 hooks and is verifiable on-chain.

Slonks wasn't an instant hit. In its first few days, it was almost overlooked in the shadow of uPEG's $30 million market cap glory. Its floor price was flat around 0.005 ETH, with little discussion on OpenSea. It wasn't until NFT veterans like 798 started posting on X, framing "wrong is art" as a shareable meme, that things changed. Simultaneously, further on-chain smart money accumulation, subsequent promotion by KOLs and media, and traffic distribution from the OpenSea homepage trending section propelled Slonks to a 60x increase in 5 days.

But SATO's key significance was proving at the foundational level that "V4 hooks can create new economic models." This was the prerequisite for uPEG and Slonks to emerge.

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

Building on the attention dividend created by uPEG, Slonks forged a stronger story hook and an interesting economic model, further driving the V4 Hook narrative.

What to Watch to Catch the Next Opportunity?

For the core Western V4 Hook circle, the BlockBeats editor primarily recommends the following users:

1. Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams), Uniswap founder, importance needs no introduction.

2. saucepoint (@saucepoint), Uniswap Foundation's hook godfather, author of v4-template. The starting code for almost all hook projects comes from the template he wrote.

3. Uniswap Official (@Uniswap) and Uniswap Foundation (@UniswapFND). The Builder Update released every Wednesday or Thursday is the most important official signal source for the track.

4. niko (@niko_eth), member of the Uniswap Labs team. It's fair to say he was a crucial baton in the first wave of KOL relays for uPEG.

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

6. Adam Hollander (@AdamHollander), OpenSea CMO. His deeper background includes being an early ecosystem driver for Hashmasks and Pudgy Penguins. He is a key messenger bridging the DeFi and NFT worlds in this wave.

7. Project accounts: uPEG Official (@unipegv4), Unimon Official (@unimonapp), Slonks Official Account, SATO Official (@Satothedog). Seeing who they follow and interact with can often uncover the next hook project that hasn't been named yet.

Beyond this, we can also focus on V4 hook and Uniswap-related websites:

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

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

3. Uniswap Foundation Builder Update is updated on the Foundation blog. The Foundation publishes it weekly on Wednesday or Thursday. Any core user focused on the Uniswap ecosystem won't miss the hottest narratives here.

The recent Blog post also mentioned community news like 'Hooks, Unipeg', etc.

4. Unichain Infinite Hackathon competition. Winning projects are almost always seeds, allowing us to identify core projects on Unichain.

5. Dune Uniswap V4 Tracker to monitor total hooks, TVL distribution, and chain volume distribution.

6. Dexscreener needs no introduction, the common K-line chart site for trading. Monitoring newly created V4 pairs is an early signal source for projects without KOL promotion. For example, uPEG's holder count jumped from 200 to 4000+ within 24 hours; that slope itself was a signal.

7. Trending lists on OpenSea + Magic Eden. Slonks appeared on OpenSea Trending the day after launch; normal NFT projects need weeks of marketing to get there. Meanwhile, on May 8th, Slonks' daily trading volume of 575 ETH surpassed CryptoPunks' 129 ETH. Any new project exceeding CryptoPunks' daily volume is a track-level signal.

8. The GitHub project awesome-uniswap-hooks lists all experimental hook projects. It's suitable for discovering early-stage projects that are "design-wise very interesting" but don't have a token yet.

The Next Phase of the V4 Hook Narrative

Here's a speculative, non-binding guess from the BlockBeats editor: If the V4 Hook narrative doesn't fizzle out immediately, the next wave of narratives will likely follow three tracks chronologically: short-term SATO bug-fix projects, mid-term hook composability, and long-term Unichain becoming the center of this track.

First is the short-term SATO bug fix project, which is already a topic of much discussion in various group chats today.

The reason SATO developed a "fix fork" like sat1 lies in its hook contract. Any V4 hook wanting to replace Uniswap's standard pricing must maintain its own ledger of "how much money is in the pool" to calculate its custom curve formula. However, Uniswap's PoolManager also maintains a real ledger. With two sets of books, they need to be synced with every swap. If the sync logic isn't rigorous, the two numbers will drift apart. In hook engineering circles, this is called "dual-state drift."

Drift creates arbitrage opportunities. At a certain moment, the hook might internally calculate that 1 SATO is worth X ETH, but the pool's actual reserves show Y ETH. Whoever finds this difference first gets to exploit it. The two addresses that made a $360,000 floating profit weren't just buying market sentiment; they were exploiting the contract's accounting vulnerability.

sat1 positions itself as "one curve, single state," using only one ledger with no drift. The engineering fix is reasonable, but the narrative is opportunistic—it tells retail investors, "SATO has a bug; I'm the correct version," aiming to capture legitimacy.

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

The essence of a bugfix fork isn't technical repair; it's narrative capture. It doesn't even need to fix anything substantially. It just needs to make "the original has a bug" a consensus on Twitter, and liquidity will migrate from the original to the new project.

V4 hooks have lowered the cost of this playbook to an unprecedented level. Hooks are open source; forking and changing three lines of code is enough for deployment. Every successful hook project inherently comes with a fork generator. SATO/sat1 is the first template; uPEG2, Slinks will inevitably follow.

In the mid-term, we can anticipate hook composability.

Currently, a V4 pool can only host one hook. But people are already working on "meta-hooks," where a single hook internally calls multiple sub-hooks to achieve composite behavior.

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

Possible future directions are plentiful: swaps triggering music or audio generation (replacing SVG with MIDI, audio being more shareable than images); swaps acting as identity or reputation systems (updating soul-bound scores with each swap); prediction market hooks (treating swaps as betting actions, running a Polymarket model within LPs); time-based hooks (longer holding periods resulting in lower sell taxes); cross-collection fusion mechanics (using hooks to fuse a Pudgy Penguin and an Azuki into a new form, most viable between CC0 projects).

The BlockBeats editor believes composability is the real ceiling for this track; single-point mechanisms are just demos.

Looking further long-term, Unichain could become the next hot chain.

Not because its technology is vastly superior, but because it has access to the Uniswap Foundation's capital, traffic, and whitelist preferences. The probability of a hook project on Unichain getting featured in the official Builder Update is an order of magnitude higher than one on Ethereum mainnet.

To catch the earliest signals, the BlockBeats editor also suggests setting up a dedicated monitoring system for Unichain: use the Unichain dashboard on Dune to check hook deployment numbers, L2Beat for TVL and active addresses, and the official builder toolkit for new tool updates.