Since late April, the Uniswap v4 hook concept has undoubtedly been the most talked-about "new" idea in the market.

The quotation marks around "new" are not because Uniswap v4 hook is a recently launched innovation. In fact, Uniswap v4 was already live on January 30 of last year.

The hook feature is neither overlooked nor unused. On the official support front, there are initiatives like the Uniswap Hook Incubator and the Uniswap Hook Designer Lab, providing funding, training, and incubation. On the adoption side, projects such as Flaunch and Bunni have embraced it, and overall TVL and trading volume within the v4 ecosystem remain strong.

It wasn't until the emergence of recent projects like $upeg, $sato, and Slonks that hooks began to spark widespread discussion among retail players. Based on this phenomenon, the author presents a provocative thesis at the outset:

For a long time, Uniswap’s promotion of hooks—especially regarding retail attention—has been misaligned.

If this misalignment is corrected, "Hook" could become the catalyst for a bull market.

Let’s break down this issue in plain terms, which will also lead us to another answer: Why has "Hook" only now captured retail interest?

In the past, our general understanding of Uniswap was that we could provide liquidity (LP) and trade (Swap). Indeed, these were the primary revenue drivers for Uniswap prior to the introduction of Hooks in v4.

Many games support player-created "plugins" to alter gameplay modes, attracting broader user bases beyond the official content. For example, in CS, without plugins, players can only play C4 planting/detonation matches. But with plugins, they can race to see who runs faster, jumps higher, even play football or basketball, or hide as part of the map to trick others.

Hooks function like game plugins—they allow Uniswap to go beyond mere LP vs. swap dynamics. However, for years, these plugins held little appeal for retail users. Either they replicated existing mechanics from other chains, or they addressed pain points in LP and trading.

This is akin to adding only minor UX enhancements in CS, such as kill statistics. While functional improvements, they lacked the imaginative spark needed to captivate retail players.

What retail players truly desire is something Uniswap's core team doesn’t offer—but can be enabled via Hooks: original, imaginative new gameplay mechanisms. The concept of "Hook" itself had previously felt too abstract for retail audiences.

So how does this "imagination" manifest in the three trending projects: $upeg, $sato, and Slonks?

$upeg’s core imagination lies in “trading as art creation and generating supply chaos.” First, its visual generation concept is fully realized—using on-chain data as input rather than merely copying existing NFT series—for every round integer purchase to become a unique artistic act. Second, the more fragmented small trades occur, the harder the image generation becomes. This transcends simple token-to-image conversion or merely making images tradable for better liquidity; instead, it shifts focus toward “predicting supply morphology.”

If $upeg exists across DEXs, CEXs, and NFT markets—both coin and artwork—how would different liquidity sources and diverse trading methods (spot, futures, LP, or buying images) impact its supply structure?

This represents a shift in attention never achieved by previous image-token projects over the past several years.

Now consider $sato. Its imaginative core isn’t simply “a bonding curve built using Uniswap v4 hook,” but rather a precise grasp of what makes a bonding curve compelling on Ethereum mainnet.

It hits the right notes:

Decentralization: Not another centralized “platform,” but a contract rigidly defined by code.

Massive internal market depth: The project must reach a $100M valuation to graduate—something implausible on any chain outside Ethereum. But on Ethereum, it’s believable, due to the perception of “old money” and “diamond hands.” This perception deepens as the curve progresses.

No intervention: Once the curve completes and tokens graduate, the contract self-destructs. Subsequent actions like pool formation are left entirely to the community.

Bonding curves aren’t novel, but $sato embodies the one most aligned with Ethereum’s ethos, shifting player attention from the mechanics of bonding curves to a “belief game.”

As for Slonks, while some praise stems from claims like “incorporates AI concepts” or “developers are co-founders of ETHS,” I believe its core appeal to retail players lies in offering a sufficiently meme-worthy gaming mechanism.

Slonks’ images are generated by on-chain neural network models re-drawing CryptoPunks. Since AI interpretation introduces deviations, the dev sees these distortions as artistic expression. The less similar the result is to the original, the higher the “slop” value.

The slop value ranges from 0 to 576, since CryptoPunks are 24x24 pixels—each pixel deviation contributes one unit of slop. With 10,000 Slonks NFTs, the theoretical maximum total slop is 576 × 10,000 = 5,760,000—the hard cap for $SLOP supply.

Holders can burn an NFT to claim $SLOP proportional to its slop value. They can merge two Slonks NFTs to create a more distorted version, unlocking greater $SLOP rewards. Or they can burn $SLOP to redeem a new AI-generated NFT with unknown slop value.

In essence, it’s a “contest of strategy and luck” where participants vie to outsmart each other.

So here’s the question: Can $upeg, $sato, or Slonks be implemented without Uniswap v4 hook? Why the need to layer on a hook?

Indeed, these projects could exist independently without hooks. But Uniswap needs them to attract retail users, and these projects benefit immensely from Uniswap’s ecosystem scale and branding.

This isn’t mandatory, but it’s a highly synergistic relationship. Had $upeg not used hooks initially, it might not have caught Uniswap’s attention, and this entire hook narrative wave may never have emerged.

As retail players, although “Uniswap v4 hook” is a widely understood concept, we shouldn’t blindly chase anything labeled “hook.” We must instead evaluate whether a project with a “hook” label offers genuinely fresh and unique mechanics, and whether its narrative is coherent and compelling—factors that determine the likelihood of Uniswap’s support and visibility.

Only when players set high standards, Uniswap commits wholeheartedly to becoming Ethereum’s application marketplace, and developers unleash abundant creativity can we truly say: “Hook” will become the gateway to the bull market.

Original: BlockBeats