If you're in a group where $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks haven't been discussed yet, you might need to switch groups.

When Slonks launched, its Mint price was under 0.004 ETH (~70 CNY), and within six days, its floor price surged to 0.123 ETH—a 60x increase. uPEG priced at $982 per unit, went from zero to a market cap of $34.44 million in just two weeks. When SATO’s market cap dipped below $3 million, early adopters leveraged the on-chain bonding curve to directly bottom-fish, opening positions of 260,000 SATO—eventually pushing the project’s market cap to $40 million and generating quick profits of $360,000.

These aren’t ordinary memecoin get-rich-quick stories. They all point to one emerging sector: Uniswap V4 Hook. In just two and a half weeks, these three projects catapulted the entire V4 hook ecosystem from a niche DeFi geek toy into mainstream visibility. Related reading: "Bull Run Trading New Tokens: Will the 'Hook' Concept Become the Catalyst for the Next Bull Market?"

For retail investors who missed early entry into $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks, how can we capture the next potential wealth opportunity? Before diving into that, let's briefly recap how the V4 Hook narrative gained traction.

In the pre-V3 era, Uniswap was merely a money-exchange counter: swap ETH for USDC, price follows x*y=k, done. With V4, the concept of "hook" was embedded into the swap lifecycle—anyone can insert their own code before, after, or at the moment of adding liquidity.

In fact, Uniswap v4 went live as early as January 30 last year. But it wasn’t until the emergence of projects like $SATO, $uPEG, and Slonks that hooks began gaining widespread attention among retail traders.

SATO was the first to break out—launched around mid-April, about a week ahead of uPEG. Yet it lacked KOL hype and had no high-profile figure like Adam Hollander endorsing it. Its growth path was more aligned with the degen crowd: keywords like “pure on-chain,” “fair launch,” “no team allocation,” and “contract runs itself” directly attracted V4 enthusiasts and bonding curve veterans.

The real breakout moment came with Unipeg (UPEG). The name “Unipeg” carries deep symbolic resonance with Uniswap’s origins, making it inherently narrative-rich and attention-grabbing.

In 2019, Hayden Adams published a blog titled “Uniswap Birthday Blog—V0,” recounting how he originally wanted to name the protocol “Unipeg”—a fusion of unicorn and pegasus. But Vitalik glanced at it and said, “Unipeg? Sounds more like Uniswap.” So Hayden settled on “Uniswap” instead.

“Uniswap” replaced “Unipeg” and became the name of a $70 billion DeFi blue-chip.

Eight years later, in April 2026, an anonymous developer (@unipegv4 on Twitter, reportedly linked to 0xHadrian’s blog) resurrected the discarded name, giving it new meaning: Uni + JPEG = uPEG. The NFT community has long referred to images as “JPEGs”; since this token was born in an Uniswap pool, it became Uniswap’s JPEG.

This story is viral-grade material—it fuses Hayden’s personal anecdote, Vitalik’s offhand remark, NFT jargon, and V4’s cutting-edge mechanism into a single, cohesive narrative.

The uPEG story is easy to tell and even easier to spread. It drew in Adam Hollander, CMO of OpenSea, who on April 25 retweeted: “I’m interested in this concept—buying some to test.”

That night, uPEG surged 3x. Then Uniswap team member niko followed up, Ouroboros co-founder Nafay, and meme coin KOL pow also posted their uPEG holdings on X. Within two weeks, uPEG grew from zero to a $34.44 million market cap, priced at $982. Related reading: "Market Cap Breaks $23M Again, What’s the Magic Behind the New Image Dog Unipeg?"

After uPEG, Slonks launched on May 1.

Developer Hirsch did something seemingly incongruous: he embedded a 214KB AI image generation model—roughly the size of a low-res mobile wallpaper—directly into an Ethereum smart contract. The model’s task: replicate 10,000 CryptoPunks.

But a 214KB model can’t store 10,000 faces. Each image is 576 pixels, and the model averages around 24 errors per image—about a 4% distortion rate. Out of 10,000, only 32 were perfectly replicated; the rest were all “distorted punks.”

Hirsch called these misaligned pixels “slop.” On Twitter, he declared the project’s ethos: “The slop is not a bug. It is the medium.” (Distortion isn’t a flaw—it’s the creative medium.)

The entire economic model is built on the principle: “More errors = higher value.” Two Slonks of the same tier can be merged—burn one to upgrade the other. The new image’s slop increases but never decreases. Any Slonk can be sent to void, and based on its slop count, 1:1 future $SLOP tokens will be minted (currently unissued). Every action is executed via V4 hook and verifiable on-chain.

Slonks didn’t go viral immediately. For several days after launch, it was overshadowed by uPEG’s $30 million market cap peak. Its floor price hovered near 0.005 ETH, and OpenSea saw little discussion—until veteran NFT players like 798 started sharing on X, turning “mistakes are art” into a viral meme. Simultaneously, on-chain smart money caught the wave, KOLs and media amplified coverage, and OpenSea’s trending feed boosted visibility—leading to a 60x surge in five days.

SATO’s significance lies in proving at the foundational level that “V4 hooks can enable novel economic models”—a prerequisite for uPEG and Slonks’ emergence.

uPEG’s importance was translating the V4 hook concept from DeFi into NFT space. Retail users suddenly realized hooks weren’t just toys for DeFi geeks—they could create things they actually wanted to buy.

Slonks built upon uPEG’s attention dividend, crafting a stronger narrative hook and a compelling economic model, further accelerating the V4 Hook narrative.

For the core V4 Hook circle overseas, BlockBeats editor recommends following these key accounts:

1. Hayden Adams (@haydenzadams), founder of Uniswap—importance speaks for itself.

2. saucepoint (@saucepoint), godfather of hooks at Uniswap Foundation, author of v4-template—almost every hook project starts with his template code.

3. Uniswap official (@Uniswap) and Uniswap Foundation (@UniswapFND)—the weekly Builder Update posts are the most important official signals in the ecosystem.

4. niko (@niko_eth), member of Uniswap Labs team—key early KOL momentum for uPEG came from him.

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

6. Adam Hollander (@AdamHollander), CMO of OpenSea, with deeper roots as an early ecosystem driver behind Hashmasks and Pudgy Penguins—this is the crucial bridge bringing DeFi energy into the NFT world.

7. Project accounts: uPEG official (@unipegv4), Unimon official (@unimonapp), Slonks official, SATO official (@Satothedog). Watching who they follow and interact with often reveals the next undiscussed hook project.

Beyond these, here are essential V4 hook and Uniswap-related resources to monitor:

1. HookRank.io is currently the cleanest V4 hook explorer—over 1,300 hooks listed, sortable by TVL/Volume/Fees, with “New” and “Trending” tags. This is the first stop to spot hooks gaining traction before Twitter picks them up.

2. HookAtlas.com is a curated directory of hook projects, complete with project descriptions—ideal for mapping the ecosystem.

3. Uniswap Foundation Builder Update—published regularly on the blog, updated weekly by the foundation on Wednesdays or Thursdays. Core Uniswap ecosystem followers won’t miss this.

4. Unichain Infinite Hackathon—prize-winning projects are almost always seed-stage. Following this competition helps identify core projects on Unichain.

5. Dune Uniswap V4 Tracker—monitor total hook count, TVL distribution, and chain volume breakdown.

6. Dexscreener—no need to explain. A standard tool for tracking token charts. Use it to spot newly created V4 pairs—the earliest signal for projects without KOL hype. For example, uPEG’s holder addresses jumped from 200 to over 4,000 in 24 hours—such a steep slope is itself a signal.

7. OpenSea + Magic Eden Trending lists—Slonks appeared on OpenSea Trending the day after launch; normal NFT projects take weeks to climb. Meanwhile, Slonks recorded 575 ETH in daily volume on May 8, surpassing CryptoPunks’ 129 ETH. Any new project exceeding CryptoPunks’ daily volume during the same period is a sector-level signal.

8. awesome-uniswap-hooks GitHub repo—catalogs all experimental hook projects. Ideal for discovering early-stage projects with interesting designs but no token yet.

Based on our editor’s speculative take (unverified): if the V4 Hook narrative doesn’t fizzle out soon, the next wave will likely unfold along three trajectories: short-term is SATO’s bug-fix phase, mid-term focuses on hook composability, long-term sees Unichain becoming the central hub of the ecosystem.

First, the short-term SATO bug fix phase is already visible across various chat groups.

SATO spawned sat1 as a “fix fork” due to a flaw in its hook contract. To replace Uniswap’s standard pricing, any V4 hook must maintain its own ledger of “how much liquidity is in the pool,” using that number to calculate its own pricing curve. But Uniswap’s PoolManager maintains a real-time ledger too. Having two ledgers simultaneously requires constant synchronization after each swap. If the sync logic is poorly written, the two values drift apart—a phenomenon known in the hook engineering community as dual-state drift.

Drift creates arbitrage opportunities. At a given moment, the hook may believe 1 SATO should be worth X ETH, while the actual pool reserves show Y ETH. The first to spot the gap gets the profit. Those two addresses that made $360,000 in floating gains weren’t betting on sentiment—they exploited accounting flaws in the contract.

sat1 brands itself as “one curve, single state”—using only one ledger, eliminating drift. The engineering fix is sound, but the narrative is manipulative: it tells retail investors “SATO has a bug, I’m the correct version,” aiming to claim legitimacy.

This tactic isn’t new to V4. Bitcoin ecosystem had ORDI, SATS, 1000SATS; ERC-404 era brought Pandora, DN404, ERC-404 V2; pump.fun era saw BankrFun, ClankerFun—each new entrant claims to have fixed the previous one’s issues.

Bugfix forks aren’t about technical repair—they’re about narrative appropriation. They don’t need to actually fix anything; they just need to make “original version has bugs” a consensus on Twitter. Liquidity then flows from original to fork.

V4 hooks have reduced the cost of this script to unprecedented lows. Hooks are open-source; forking and modifying three lines of code allows instant deployment. Every successful hook project comes with a fork generator. SATO/sat1 set the precedent—future versions like uPEG2, Slinks are inevitable.

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

Currently, one V4 pool can host only one hook. But developers are already building “meta-hooks”—hooks that invoke multiple sub-hooks internally to enable composite behaviors.

Once this works, uPEG’s image generation + Slonks’ NFT-token swap + SATO’s bonding curve can coexist in a single pool. One swap triggers image generation, updates pricing curves, and mints NFTs—all at once.

Potential directions are vast: swap-triggered music/audio generation (SVG → MIDI, audio spreads faster than images); swap as identity/reputation system (each swap updates soul-bound score); prediction market hooks (treating swap as a bet, running Polymarket-style markets within LPs); time-based hooks (longer holding = lower sell tax); cross-collection fusion (use hooks to merge Pudgy Penguin and Azuki into new forms—most feasible between CC0 projects).

BlockBeats editor believes composability is the true ceiling of this sector—single-point mechanisms are just demos.

Looking longer-term, Unichain may emerge as the next hot chain.

Not because of superior tech, but due to funding, traffic, and whitelist advantages from the Uniswap Foundation. Hook projects on Unichain have a far higher chance of being featured in official Builder Updates compared to Ethereum mainnet.

To catch the earliest signals, BlockBeats editor also recommends monitoring Unichain separately: use Dune’s Unichain dashboard to track hook deployments, L2Beat for TVL and active addresses, and the official builder toolkit for new tool releases.

Original article: BlockBeats