Author: Curry , Deep Tide TechFlow
Still FOMO about yesterday's hot Ethereum project, Slonk? Actually, a new narrative has arrived:
V4 Hook.
In the past two weeks, Uniswap V4's Hook mechanism has suddenly become incredibly popular. SATO used Hook to create an on-chain bonding curve, and its market capitalization surged to $40 million. uPEG, leveraging a viral story based on a discarded Uniswap naming draft, reached over $30 million in two weeks. Slonks incorporated an AI model into a smart contract to mimic CryptoPunk, and within six days of its launch, it traded 586 ETH.
Although the three projects have different gameplay, they all use Uniswap's V4 mechanism.
Now the fourth one has arrived.
The new project is called $UORE, which just launched yesterday. In short , it packages on-chain mining, coin purchase lottery, automatic generation of pixel NFTs, and deflationary burning mechanism into a single trading pool in Uniswap V4.
Because when you buy a coin in this pool, the contract will simultaneously complete all six of the above tasks in the background, resulting in a transaction's gas cost being two to three times that of a regular swap...
If you open a CT scan now, you'll find that everyone is complaining about the high gas levels.
Regarding the token, as of press time, GMGN data shows that $UORE's market capitalization surged to $1.2 million within hours of its launch, before quickly falling back to $440,000. The pool's liquidity was only $64,000, but the 24-hour trading volume reached $1.2 million, meaning the money in the pool rolled over nearly twenty times.
However, there are only 741 holders, and the total supply is less than 10,000 coins.
Currently, the risk appears extremely high. After some simple research, I personally believe it's the most complex project in the V4 Hook ecosystem (this round of new on-chain features tends to be mechanicically incomprehensible...).
It is simultaneously a token, an NFT collection, a staking mining farm, and a lottery system. Moreover, these four things are not independent; they are welded together.
Four-in-one mine
In most NFT projects, tokens and NFTs are two separate things, bought and sold separately.
UORE is not. Its NFT is called Oreling, which is a 32x32 pixel miner figure embedded directly in the token. For every integer amount of UORE you hold in your wallet, there is automatically one Oreling.
When you buy coins, the contract mints them for you; when you sell coins, the contract burns them for you; and when you transfer coins, the Oreling goes with you. You cannot buy an Oreling separately, nor can you extract it from UORE.
Each Oreling's characteristics are determined by the hash value of the next block the moment it is minted. This means that when you buy it, you don't know what kind of Oreling you will get, and even the validators cannot see the result in advance.
The differences between these little figures are not just about whether they are good-looking or not.
Each Oreling has a Class (rarity) and a Hash (a random number from 1 to 100). The product of the two is its Mining Power, which is the mining hashrate.
The most common Mortal accounts for 60%, with a 1x multiplier; the rarest God has only a 1% probability, with a 5x multiplier. If you're lucky enough to draw a God with a Hash of 100, your computing power will be 500, more than ten times that of an ordinary miner.
So what's the use of computing power? The old method: staking.
Once you stake your Oreling into the mining pool, you'll start receiving daily UORE releases based on your hashrate share. According to the official white paper, 1000 UORE are released on the first day, decreasing by 1% daily thereafter, with a half-life of approximately 69 days. 80% of the released UORE goes to stakers, and 20% goes into the Motherlode reward pool.
This rate of decay means that 97% of the total emissions will be released within a year. The earlier you start mining, the bigger the pie you get.
There's a noteworthy design element when claiming rewards: a 10% "refining tax" is deducted and redistributed to all stakers who haven't yet claimed their rewards. The white paper calls this the refined-ore boost.
In layman's terms, the later someone claims their money, the more taxes others pay. Those eager to claim their money are subsidizing those who are patient.
Then there's Motherlode, which translates to "mineral prize".
Every time you purchase ≥ 0.1 ETH of UORE through official channels, you automatically receive one lottery ticket. The odds of winning are linked to the purchase amount: approximately 1/600 for 0.1 ETH, approximately 1/200 for 0.5 ETH, and a maximum of 1% for 1 ETH. The odds do not increase beyond 1 ETH to prevent large holders from manipulating the odds.
If you win, the prize pool is split in two: 50% goes directly to the buyer, and 50% is randomly distributed to a staker (weighted by computing power). As of press time, there have only been four such wins in history, with the largest single winnings being 6.4 UORE.
Finally, there's the deflationary flywheel.
Buying incurs a 1% tax and the UORE is burned directly; selling incurs a 1% tax and the UORE goes into the buyback vault. Once the vault accumulates 0.1 ETH, anyone can trigger an automatic buyback, burning all the UORE purchased. As of press time, 58 buybacks have been executed, burning a total of 358 UORE.
Overall, the design features a small innovation in the token gameplay and the old trick of creating scarcity, making it another Ponzi-style economic model design.
The project code is forked, but the gameplay is stitched together.
UORE was not written from scratch.
Someone in the community looked through the source code and found a folder called reference/unipeg-hook-source/ in the code directory. Founder Noah himself didn't hide it either; he directly stated on Twitter that UORE's contract forked uPEG and fixed two known issues with uPEG: NFT duplication and flash loan rarity manipulation attacks.
I checked the founder's account, and his bio says "Ethereum dev & BAYC holder". On May 2nd, he posted his first tweet about UORE, saying that the project combines the mining ideas of ORE on Solana with the V4 Hook architecture of uPEG.
He also tagged Unicurvefun and Openpeg, asking if they could support Orelings trading after their markets went live.
Based on this publicly available information, the lineage of the UORE project is quite clear:
Solana ORE provides a "on-chain mining + lottery" gameplay template, uPEG provides a V4 Hook code skeleton, and Noah has made improvements and assembly on these two basis.
The fork itself isn't the problem. I think the current problem lies in:
- Gas consumption. Reports on CT indicate that each UORE transaction requires six steps within the Hook, resulting in gas costs two to three times that of a regular swap. After a few back-and-forth movements, little profit may remain.
- The time window is closing. The V4 hook narrative is affected by the decline in uPEG, meaning the ceiling for subsequent projects will continue to decrease. UORE is the fourth project in this hook craze, and the popularity of the previous three is already cooling down. The window of attention in this sector is closing fast.
- Complexity. UORE is probably the project with the most complex mechanisms among these four projects. For an average user to understand the entire set of rules, including Oreling rarity, computing power calculation, staking decay, refining tax, Motherlode probability, and buyback trigger conditions, the threshold is not low. Moreover, the official website is as enigmatic as a riddle.
Moreover, the project white paper is also quite interesting:
Read the contracts and understand the mechanics before deploying capital.
This sentence roughly translates to "Understand it before you come back; don't blame me if you don't."
By combining the previous Hook projects, we can see that this wave of on-chain trends all involve complex mechanism designs and significant information asymmetry, showing alpha potential, but the shelf life of alpha is getting shorter and shorter.
SATO gave you a week, uPEG gave you a few days, and with UORE, you might only have a few hours left to understand the rules...
By the time you understand it, the market trend may have already ended.
