Since late April, the concept of Uniswap v4 hook has undoubtedly been the most discussed "new" idea in the market.

The quotation marks around the word "new" are not meant to imply that Uniswap v4 hook is a freshly launched novelty. In fact, Uniswap v4 was already live as early as 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, offering funding, training, and incubation. On adoption side, projects such as Flaunch and Bunni have emerged, and overall TVL and trading volume within the v4 ecosystem remain strong.

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

For a long time, Uniswap’s promotion of hook, particularly regarding retail awareness, has been misaligned.

If this misalignment is corrected, “Hook” could become the catalyst for the next bull market.

Let’s explain this issue in plain terms, which will also lead us to another answer: why has “Hook” only now captured the attention of retail investors?

In the past, our general perception of Uniswap was that we could provide liquidity (LP) and trade (Swap). And indeed, these were the primary revenue drivers for Uniswap before the introduction of Hooks in v4.

Many games support player communities creating “plugins” to alter gameplay modes, thus attracting broader user bases beyond the original official mechanics. For example, in CS, without plugins, players can only play C4 planting/demolition matches. But with plugins, they can race to see who runs faster, jumps higher, even play football or basketball, or disguise themselves as part of the map to deceive others.

Hook functions like a game plugin—it enables Uniswap to transcend mere LP vs. swap dynamics. Yet for years, these plugins lacked appeal to retail users. Either they simply replicated existing mechanisms from other chains, or they addressed pain points related to LP and trading.

This is akin to installing only performance-optimizing plugins in CS—like kill statistics—making the game better, but lacking the imaginative spark to captivate retail players.

What retail players truly want is novel, imaginative gameplay that Uniswap’s official team does not offer, but can be enabled through Hooks. The concept of “Hook,” until recently, felt too abstract to retail audiences.

So how is this “imagination” demonstrated in the three popular projects: $upeg, $sato, and Slonks?

The core imagination of $upeg lies in “trading as art creation and manufacturing supply chaos.” First, its visual concept is fully realized—not merely copying existing NFT series, but using on-chain data as input for artistic generation. Every integer purchase becomes a new creative act. Second, the more fragmented small trades occur, the harder it becomes to generate the image. This transcends simple token-to-image conversion or merely making images liquid by representing them as tokens. Instead, it shifts focus toward “predicting supply morphology.”

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

This represents a shift in attention never achieved by prior generative art token projects over the past several years.

Now consider $sato. Its core imagination isn’t simply “building a bonding curve using Uniswap v4 hook,” but rather precisely identifying what makes a bonding curve on Ethereum mainnet compelling.

It hits key notes:

Decentralization: This isn’t another centralized “platform”—it’s a contract governed entirely by code.

Massive internal market: The project must reach a $100M market cap to graduate. Doing this on any chain outside Ethereum would seem implausible. But on Ethereum, it feels credible—due to the perception of “old money” and “diamond hands” on the network. This perception deepens as the curve progresses.

Zero intervention: Once the curve completes and the token graduates, the contract self-destructs. Subsequent actions like pool formation are left to community governance.

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

As for Slonks, while many positive voices cite factors like “AI integration” or “founder is co-founder of ETHS,” I believe its core appeal to retail users lies in its “highly meme-worthy gameplay mechanism.”

Slonks’ images are re-drawn using on-chain neural network models based on CryptoPunks. Since AI is involved, deviations are inevitable. The dev sees these imperfections as artistic expression—the less similar the output is to the original, the higher the “slop” value.

The slop value ranges from 0 to 576, corresponding to the 24x24 pixel resolution of CryptoPunks—each pixel deviation contributing one unit of slop. With 10,000 Slonks NFTs total, the theoretical maximum slop sum is 576 × 10,000 = 5,760,000—also the supply cap for $SLOP.

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, yielding more $SLOP. Or burn $SLOP to receive a new AI-generated NFT with unknown slop value.

Essentially, it’s a “game of strategy and luck” where players compete to outsmart each other.

So here’s the question: couldn’t $upeg, $sato, and Slonks be built without Uniswap v4 hook? Why the need to layer on hook?

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

It’s not essential—but it’s a highly synergistic relationship. Had $upeg not used hook initially, it might not have caught Uniswap’s attention, and this entire wave of “hook storytelling” may never have emerged.

As retail players, although “Uniswap v4 hook” is a widely understood concept, we shouldn’t blindly rush into every “hook” project. We must instead assess whether the project’s gameplay is genuinely fresh and unique, and whether its narrative is sufficiently cohesive—factors that determine the likelihood of receiving Uniswap’s attention and support.

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

Original: Lawful BlockBeats