Looking back on the past week's market trends, overall, it can be said that there has been a shift from excitement to gradually increasing calmness. Although the market has entered a temporary consolidation phase, the good news is that each chain has distinct characteristics and offers different narrative angles.

ETH Mainnet

There are currently two clear storylines unfolding on the ETH mainnet.

- The Musk concept led by $ASTEROID. Due to a lack of further angles, $ASTEROID has not experienced any forking and has shown a stable price performance. Emerging from a slight dip that saw its market cap fall below $100 million at the end of April, the price of $ASTEROID has gradually recovered to around $180 million.

Sometimes, having few angles can also be a good thing, allowing funds to rally around this single narrative.

- The Uniswap v4 hook concept led by $uPEG. After experiencing controversies surrounding clones and low-cost rarity farming, the $uPEG dev team's calm handling has gained broad market acceptance—no changes to the contract, no market-side forced intervention, just the addition of a tag to let the market determine the value. This approach bears a strong resemblance to the old ways of Ethereum—code is code, rules are rules, and the market decides everything.

Currently, $uPEG has been launched on OpenSea in the form of an NFT, which has raised market expectations. We may potentially witness the first project that exists simultaneously in DEX, CEX, and NFT markets in both token and NFT form, with the complexity of liquidity having a profound impact on the coin's value.

Despite weathering a significant storm, the price performance of $uPEG is still adjusting, falling from a pre-storm peak of over $30 million market cap to a $12 million market cap. Whether it can return to its previous high and even break through to new highs depends on whether the market can accept the Uniswap v4 hook as a new narrative track, sparking broader hype.

Outside of $uPEG, another Uniswap v4 hook concept project that has garnered attention is $sato. In simple terms, this is a bonding curve implemented with Uniswap v4 hook, with the graduation condition being the token minted up to 99% (corresponding to a $100 million market cap).

Before reaching a $100 million market cap, it is considered an "internal circulation" stage (but to achieve internal circulation effects, trading must be done through its official website). During the internal circulation stage, each transaction incurs a 0.3% fee. This fee is permanently retained in the account and cannot be transferred, acting as a transaction tax to prevent price manipulation. In addition, there is a single purchase limit of 5 ETH, and selling in the same block as the last purchase will revoke the transaction, making flash loan arbitrage unprofitable and preventing single trades from extreme supply polarization.

When the minting amount reaches 99%, the contract will self-destruct, and no new tokens can be minted from the bonding curve. However, the hook will continue to function, and sellback transactions will still be allowed. At this point, the sellback is equivalent to a one-way token burn.

Therefore, $sato is also seen by some players as a potential form of Ethereum's pump.fun—a hardcoded contract, decentralized, with a large internal supply.

If Uniswap v4's hook can eventually grow into a new narrative track, based on current observations, some initial project evaluation criteria have been proposed:

- Whether Uniswap will add the hook to the official whitelist. Although this whitelist only affects the routing on the Uniswap official interface (i.e., whether buying and selling through Uniswap's official interface will achieve immediate interaction), for projects without this whitelist, users often need to use their own front end to trade to trigger the hook (e.g., sat0, which requires using the project's front end to operate). Additionally, this can also be seen as a reference for whether a project can engage with Uniswap.

- Whether the gameplay must be achieved through the hook, or in other words, the integrity of the narrative. Taking uPEG as an example, it is not just a simple transaction=minting/burning, but each transaction's data serves as the basis for the production of images. At the same time, transactions will affect the project's token and image supply situation, and as the token becomes more fragmented, the difficulty of image production increases. This is in the style of older Ethereum projects, where understanding has a certain threshold, and it is not about hooking for the sake of hooking but rather to give a clear overall understanding of why doing so is elegant.

- Whether the project team has maintained sufficient decentralization during operation. For example, uPEG is not willing to forcibly change the contract to intervene in the market (burning replicas), and the sat0 contract will self-destruct after minting is complete and emphasizes autonomous operation without the need for human intervention.

Solana

There was no particularly noticeable highlight for Solana during the May Day holiday. However, this morning, Upbit listed the well-established Solana meme coin $WIF, which briefly surged by about 30%.

It remains to be seen whether this will be a sign of a meme coin market revival on Solana.

Additionally, Google Cloud and the Solana Foundation jointly launched the Pay.sh payment system for AI agents, supporting on-demand payment of API call fees on the Solana blockchain using stablecoins. Among the partners displayed on the website, $PAYAI is listed, causing the coin to briefly surge by 4 times, breaking through a $10 million market cap and now stabilizing at around a $9 million market cap.

Base

Similar to the ETH mainnet, Base also has two main threads.

- "Institutional Backing Plate". Although $LFI is conceptually classified as RWA, the project claims to be built by a team from one of the largest property tax lien hedge funds in the United States. It aims to address the actual operational friction and significant knowledge barriers that ordinary investors face when trying to earn returns from property tax liens.

Here is a brief explanation of what a "property tax lien" is. Real estate owners in the United States have to pay property taxes to the government. If a property owner fails to pay the taxes on time, after a government warning and a waiting period, a tax lien is placed on the delinquent property and then auctioned off.

If you purchase the tax lien, it is like you have paid the taxes on behalf of the property owner. At this point, you become the new lienholder, and the delinquent property owner owes you the unpaid taxes plus interest. If the property owner fails to redeem the tax debt and interest within the specified period, you have the opportunity to foreclose on the property directly through a redemption process.

Therefore, $LFI has brought this somewhat alternative investment onto the chain. However, the reason this project has received hype is not because this track is particularly appealing, but mainly because it reminded everyone of previous Base projects like $KTA — with a strong background, a long uptrend, but a high peak. Currently, $LFI has a market cap of around $9 million.

- AI Narratives. $CLANKER and $VIRTUAL have both seen some gains. There are also some new AI projects that have attracted more attention, such as $AWP, which allows autonomous AI agents to complete specific tasks for mining participation, and $RogueAI, an AI agent that plays blockchain games.

TON

On May 4, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced on his personal channel that the fees for TON have been reduced by six times, almost to 0. Next, Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and become its largest validator. TON's focus will shift to technical superiority, with a brand-new ton.org, new development tools, and a new performance upgrade. The specific timing will take approximately 2 to 3 weeks and is the 3rd step in the "Make TON Great Again" 7-step plan.

Following this news, both TON and TON-based tokens experienced a general price increase. The biggest gainers were some Telegram mini-games and meme projects already present on the TON network, such as $UTYA, $DOGS, $NOT, $CATI, and others.

A new meme coin, $MTONGA (Make TON Great Again), surged after gaining control of ton.org on May 4, skyrocketing nearly 16x at one point. Currently, $MTONGA has a market capitalization of around $3 million.

BSC

Still dominated by "double saints pumping" and "leading the charge," notable mentions include the $GoForIt reply and the $PandaHead, led by @Sencrazy_1, a figure from legend who made $30 million on $PNUT and $20 million on $TRUMP, garnering significant attention.

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