degen

everyone's talking about @Uniswap v4 Hooks and most of CT has no idea what they actually are let me explain why this might be the most important thing happening on EVM right now - What hooks actually are: Uniswap v4 turned the protocol from a DEX into a platform in v2 and v3, every pool worked the same way. same math, same fees, same behavior. you could change the fee tier or the price range but the core logic was identical for every single pool on the protocol. you were trading on uniswap's rules, always v4 hooks change that completely. a hook is a smart contract that plugs into a pool and runs custom code at specific moments: before a swap, after a swap, before liquidity is added, after it's removed, when fees accrue. every single touchpoint in a pool's lifecycle can now have custom logic injected into it this means anyone can build their own AMM design inside uniswap. inside uniswap itself, with all of Uniswap's liquidity infrastructure, routing, aggregator integrations you're not building a DEX competitor. you're building a plugin for the biggest DEX that already exists. your custom pool gets routed through the universal router, indexed by 1inch, cow swap, paraswap, and every aggregator. your weird experimental AMM design gets the same distribution as Uniswap's core pools. permissionlessly. that's insane and most people haven't realized what it means yet - what's already been built: the first wave of hook tokens proved the concept: $01 (zero1.cash): currently the biggest V4 hook token. pay-to-mint bonding curve, hook-enforced so nobody can bypass the price, immutable from launch. but this one keeps what you pay. every buy locks USDS into a reserve held as sUSDS, and the yield only ever raises the buyback floor, never leaves. 0.25% burned on every trade. then it goes past all of them: a real Zcash-style shielded pool for private holdings, lending against your bag, and USD0, a dollar backed 1:1 that moves in private. bonded at a $2M reserve, trades around $40M, no owner, no team, no off switch. ~5000 holders, almost all Chinese, and still barely on the timeline. $SATO: same pay-to-mint bonding curve with permanent locked reserves and deflationary burns. peaked at $40M mcap. the hook enforced the mint price curve, meaning nobody could bypass it. the rules were baked into the pool itself, immutable from the moment it launched, but it had an error $uPEG (Unipeg): every time someone swapped, the hook generated a unique 24x24 pixel NFT fully onchain. the swap itself created art. no external server, no IPFS, just code running inside the pool. hit $34M mcap in two weeks from zero. the CMO of OpenSea bought it Slonks: AI-generated distorted CryptoPunks. buy the token, the hook mints you an NFT. burn the NFT plus tokens to upgrade to a rarer version. the pool itself was the game engine. 60x from mint price in 6 days Dogeshit: you couldn't even call the contract directly. you had to type "mint me some shit" into a Claude AI chat, and a relayer executed the mint through the hook. EIP-7702 + AI + v4 hook working together each of these is a completely different mechanism. completely different economic model. completely different user experience. all running inside Uniswap v4. all permissionless. all immutable once deployed - why this is bigger than a memecoin meta: the v4 hook tokens that ran were creative experiments. they proved the technology works. but the real story isn't the memes, it's what the technology enables every single one of these is a different financial product running inside the same protocol. and anyone can deploy one without permission - what to look for: the first wave was creative memecoins with novel mechanisms. the second wave will be actual financial infrastructure the v4 hook tokens worth paying attention to aren't the ones with the funniest name. they're the ones with mechanisms that couldn't exist anywhere else. tokenomics that are enforced by the pool, not by trust. economic models that are immutable from deploy. new ways of distributing value that only work because the hook makes them automatic and unstoppable the power of hooks isn't deploying tokens: it's deploying mechanisms. new financial primitives that live inside the most liquid DEX in existence every interesting AMM idea that's been stuck in someone's research paper for 5 years can now be deployed as a hook. every custom trading mechanic that would've required building an entire protocol from scratch can now be a plugin. every experimental tokenomics model can now be enforced by code instead of promised by a team