Curry, Shenchao TechFlow
Still FOMOing about yesterday’s hot Ethereum chain project, Slonk? Actually, a new narrative has arrived:
V4 Hook.
Over the past two weeks, Uniswap V4’s Hook mechanism suddenly gained massive attention: SATO used Hooks to create an on-chain bonding curve, pushing its market cap to $40 million. uPEG, leveraging a viral story based on Uniswap’s abandoned naming drafts, reached $30 million in just two weeks. Slonks embedded an AI model into a smart contract to replicate CryptoPunks, generating 586 ETH in trading volume within six days.
Although the three projects have different gameplay, they all utilize Uniswap's V4 mechanism.
Now the fourth one has arrived.
The new project is called $UORE—it launched yesterday and, in one sentence: it bundles on-chain mining, token purchase lotteries, auto-generated pixel NFTs, and a deflationary burn mechanism into a single Uniswap V4 trading pool.
Because purchasing a token in this pool triggers the contract to simultaneously complete all six of the above actions, the gas fee for one transaction is two to three times that of a regular swap...
Right now, if you open CT, you'll find everyone complaining about the high gas fees.
Regarding the token, according to GMGN data as of press time, $UORE reached a market cap of $1.2 million within hours of listing, then quickly dropped to $440,000. The liquidity pool held only $64,000, yet the 24-hour trading volume reached $1.2 million—meaning the funds in the pool turned over nearly twenty times.
However, there are only 741 holders, with a total supply of fewer than 10,000 tokens.
The risk currently appears extremely high. After a brief review, I believe this is the most complex project within the V4 Hook ecosystem (this round of on-chain innovations all seem designed to make the mechanics intentionally confusing...).
It is simultaneously a token, an NFT collection, a staking mine, and a lottery system—and these four elements are not separate; they are welded together.
Four-in-one mining farm
For most NFT projects, tokens and NFTs are two separate items, bought and sold independently.
No, UORE is not. Its NFT is called Oreling—a 32×32 pixel miner character embedded directly within the token. For every whole UORE in your wallet, you automatically receive one Oreling.
When you buy coins, the contract mints them for you; when you sell coins, the contract burns them for you. When you transfer, Oreling moves with it. You cannot buy Oreling separately, nor can you separate it from UORE.
Each Oreling's traits are determined by the hash of the next block at the moment it is minted. This means you won’t know what character you’ll get when you purchase it—not even the validators can see the outcome in advance.
The differences between these characters go beyond just how they look.
Each Oreling has a Class (rarity) and a Hash (a random number between 1 and 100); their product equals its Mining Power.
The most common Mortal makes up 60% with a mining power multiplier of 1x; the rarest God has only a 1% chance and a multiplier of 5x. If you're lucky enough to draw a God with a Hash of 100, your mining power becomes 500—more than ten times that of a regular miner.
So what is hashing power used for? The classic method: staking.
By staking Oreling in the pool, you begin receiving daily UORE emissions based on your share of the total hash rate. According to the official whitepaper, 1,000 UORE are released on day one, with a daily decay of 1%, resulting in a half-life of approximately 69 days. Of the released UORE, 80% is distributed to stakers, and 20% goes to the Motherlode reward pool.
This decay rate means that 97% of the total emission will be released within one year. The earlier you start mining, the larger your share.
When claiming rewards, note this design feature: 10% of the reward is deducted as a "refinement tax" and redistributed to all stakers who have not yet claimed their rewards. The whitepaper refers to this as the refined-ore boost.
In simple terms, the later you claim, the more taxes paid by others you get to keep. People who rush to claim are subsidizing those who are patient.
Then there's Motherlode, which translates to "Treasure Mine."
Each time you purchase ≥ 0.1 ETH worth of UORE through official channels, you automatically receive one lottery ticket. Your odds of winning are tied to the amount purchased: approximately 1 in 600 for 0.1 ETH, 1 in 200 for 0.5 ETH, and a maximum of 1 in 100 for 1 ETH. Odds do not increase beyond 1 ETH to prevent large holders from manipulating probabilities.
If won, the prize pool is split in half: 50% goes directly to the buyer, and 50% is randomly distributed to a staker (weighted by hashing power). As of publication, this has occurred only four times in history, with the largest payout being 6.4 UORE.
Finally, there is the deflationary flywheel.
A 1% tax is applied on buys and immediately burned; a 1% tax is applied on sells and deposited into the buyback treasury. When the treasury accumulates 0.1 ETH, anyone can trigger an automatic buyback, during which all repurchased UORE are burned. As of publication, 58 buybacks have been executed, cumulatively burning 358 UORE.
Looking at the entire design, the token mechanics offer minor innovations, rely on old tricks to create scarcity, and are yet another Ponzi scheme in economic model design.
The project code is forked, and the gameplay is stitched together.
UORE was not written from scratch.
Someone in the community reviewed the source code and found a folder named reference/unipeg-hook-source/ in the directory. Founder Noah didn’t hide it—he openly stated on Twitter that the UORE contract forked uPEG and fixed two known issues with uPEG: duplicate NFT generation and flash loan-based rarity manipulation attacks.
I checked out the founder’s account, and his bio reads: "Ethereum dev & BAYC holder." On May 2, he posted his first tweet about UORE, stating that the project combines the mining concept of ORE on Solana with the uPEG V4 Hook architecture.
He also directly mentioned Unicurvefun and Openpeg, asking if they could support Orelings trading after launching on their platforms.
From these public details, the lineage of the UORE project is clear:
Solana ORE provides a gameplay template of "on-chain mining + lottery," uPEG provides the code framework for V4 Hook, and Noah improved and integrated both.
The fork itself is not the issue. I think the current problem lies in:
- Gas. On CT, users reported that each UORE transaction requires six steps within the Hook, consuming two to three times the gas of a regular swap. After accounting for fees, there may be little to no profit left.
- Time window. The V4 Hook narrative has been impacted by the decline of uPEG, and subsequent project caps will continue to decrease. UORE is the fourth project in this wave of Hook momentum, and interest in the first three has already begun to cool. The market’s attention window won’t wait.
- Complexity. UORE may have the most intricate mechanics among these four projects. For an average user to understand the entire set of rules—including Oreling rarity, hash rate calculation, staking decay, refining taxes, Motherlode probability, and buyback triggers—is no small feat, and the official website presents them in an enigmatic way.
And the project’s whitepaper is also interesting:
Read the contracts and understand the mechanics before deploying capital.
Come back when you understand it; if you don’t understand, don’t blame me.
By synthesizing the previous Hook projects, we can see that this on-chain market trend is characterized by complex mechanism design and significant information asymmetry—offering alpha potential, but with an increasingly short shelf life for that alpha.
SATO gave you a week, uPEG gave you a few days, but with UORE, you may only have a few hours left to understand the rules...
By the time you understand it, the market move may already be over.