Alpha Recap #12: ETHGas Airdrop, sPENDLE and Bitcoin Credit

The Alpha Recap aims to present the most important crypto market Alphas of the week. Every Friday, we provide a condensed overview of the most valuable information from our Alpha Feed.

Reserved for OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed brings together insights, yield and airdrop strategies, as well as key market information. In other words, what defines OAK Research: delivering filtered content that goes beyond market noise.

ETHGas Airdrop

This week, we discussed the ETHGas airdrop, a real-time infrastructure designed to transform gas fees into a structured and tradable asset.

In practice, ETHGas positions itself upstream of Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS). The protocol allows validators to sell their future capacity up to 64 blocks in advance, roughly 12 minutes, through standardized contracts. In short, ETHGas aims to monetize blockspace, opening the door to use cases that were previously impossible.

We first started covering ETHGas several months ago in the Alpha Feed, both to present the project’s thesis and to track its development, but also because it ran a points-based campaign, the “Beans”, that largely flew under the radar.

This week, the campaign culminated in an airdrop. Users who accumulated at least 500 Beans, spent at least 0.5 ETH on the linked address, and shared their Gas ID on X are eligible. This is precisely the purpose of the Alpha Feed: to deliver concise, informative and above all actionable content.

Pendle replaces vePENDLE with sPENDLE

A major update this week for Pendle, the protocol that introduced yield speculation on assets. Pendle has decided to abandon its historical vePENDLE in favor of sPENDLE, which completely reshapes the financial architecture around Pendle’s staking model.

This decision stems from a clear observation: despite strong protocol growth, with revenues multiplied by 60 over two years, only 20 percent of the PENDLE supply was staked. The ve(3,3) model, popularized by Curve, failed for vePENDLE because users are no longer willing to accept long lockups and heavy governance, especially on an already highly technical protocol.

In short, there was a clear misalignment between a fast-growing protocol and its token. sPENDLE aims to change this through several key innovations, including:

• liquid staking with flexible unstaking, either 14 days or instant with a 5 percent penalty,
• up to 80 percent of protocol revenues redistributed to stakers via buybacks,
• algorithmic emissions replacing weekly governance votes.

The result is a simpler, more liquid model that is far better aligned with actual DeFi usage today, including for institutional players.

In practical terms, the investment thesis around Pendle changes entirely. sPENDLE was deployed today and will fully replace vePENDLE on January 29.

→ Read our in-depth article on Pendle to fully understand its unique design:

Saturn, the YZi Labs-backed project betting on Bitcoin credit

Finally, this week we highlighted Saturn, a project that has just raised 800,000 dollars from YZi Labs, Sora Ventures and around twenty individual investors.

Saturn positions itself as an alternative to traditional stablecoins, whose yields are now largely captured by issuers and rely almost exclusively on US T-bills or DeFi-native leverage loops. In contrast, Saturn aims to tap into a still marginal segment of the crypto ecosystem: institutional credit backed by Bitcoin.

The design relies on two complementary assets. On one side, USDat, a stablecoin overcollateralized by tokenized US Treasury bills to ensure liquidity and stability in the early phases.

On the other, sUSDat, obtained by staking USDat at a 1:1 ratio. sUSDat captures the yields generated by Bitcoin credit, which translates into a gradual appreciation of the exchange rate between sUSDat and USDat.

Concretely, staked funds are progressively reallocated from tokenized T-bills toward Bitcoin credit strategies, initially with full exposure to STRC, one of the financial products issued by Strategy.

The protocol also plans for dynamic reserve management. In favorable conditions, exposure to Bitcoin credit could be increased to optimize yield. Conversely, if the risk profile deteriorates, Saturn may reallocate part of the reserves back into tokenized T-bills to preserve USDat stability.

For now, everything remains at the prototype stage, but the project’s ambitions are significant. Saturn clearly belongs to this new wave of projects embodying the gradual shift of yield generation from purely endogenous DeFi mechanisms toward flows derived from institutional balance sheets rooted in the real world.

→ We presented Strategy’s various financial products in detail in our end-of-year 2025 report, available for free download here:

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