Alpha Recap #2: Ethereal Mainnet, Aave’s Pivot, MegaETH ICO, and Pendle Yield
October 24, 2025
In this new edition of the Alpha Recap, we highlight the week’s key crypto insights - major news, yield and airdrop strategies, essential data, and quick analyses - to help you go beyond the noise.
The Alpha Recap brings you the most important crypto market Alphas of the week. Every Friday, we publish a summary of the most valuable insights from our Alpha Feed.
Reserved for OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed compiles insights, yield and airdrop strategies, and key market information. In short, it’s the essence of OAK Research: filtered, high-value content that goes beyond the market noise.
Ethereal Goes Mainnet and Launches Season 1 (Epoch 2) of Its Airdrop
Ethereal is a perps DEX powered by Ethena, the issuer of the USDe stablecoin. It combines high performance and low latency through a centralized order book execution managed by the team.
Ethereal positions itself as the native trading layer of the Ethena ecosystem, allowing traders to use USDe as margin on their positions while earning yield. This direct link with Ethena makes Ethereal one of the most promising perps DEXs of the moment.
Over the past few months, Ethereal has run several campaigns. As mentioned on OAK Research last month, the protocol previously offered two ways to earn points: through its Pre-Season and Season 0.
This week, Ethereal launched Epoch 2, ending the previous reward phases.
Access to the platform remains limited to the first 100 users on the waitlist, with others gradually added in the coming weeks. Waitlist ranking depends on several factors: participation in Season Zero, referral activity, and on-chain interactions.
In this Alpha, we covered Ethereal’s roadmap, campaign details, and additional insights to help contextualize its role within the Ethena ecosystem.
Join the waitlist with our referral link
Aave Acquires Stable Finance to Target the Mass Market
Aave Labs has acquired Stable Finance, a U.S.-based fintech company developing Stable, a fully mobile app focused on stablecoin yield.
As part of this acquisition, the founder of Stable Finance will become Aave Labs’ Director of Product, and the entire Stable engineering team will join Aave Labs.
We expect Aave to pivot toward a segment it has rarely reached before: retail users.
“On-chain finance,” “consumer products,” “savings”… Everything suggests Aave now aims to play the crypto neobank card-a narrative taking shape as new players like Mantle’s UR, Plasma One, Avici, and Ether.fi make similar moves.
The entry of a major player like Aave into this emerging sector will likely mark a key turning point.
By launching a neobank-or at least an accessible savings app-Aave would complete its trio of market coverage: Institutional (Horizon), DeFi (Aave Protocol), and Retail (via Stable).
Ultimately, this means more protocol revenue, potentially higher AAVE buybacks, and additional resources to grow its ecosystem.
MegaETH Chooses an Auction-Style ICO for Its MEGA Token - A Guaranteed Profit?
MegaETH, the Layer 2 known for its extreme scalability (over 100,000 TPS on paper), is preparing to launch its ICO on Sonar, the platform founded by Cobie and recently acquired by Coinbase.
After raising $10 million in seconds on Echo, MegaETH is back with a slightly unusual approach: an English auction, where the final token price depends on demand.
A total of 5% of the supply (500 million MEGA tokens) will be sold, with a fully diluted valuation (FDV) between $1 million and $999 million-meaning the token price could range from $0.0001 to $0.0999. Contributions will be capped between $2,650 and $186,282 to avoid excessive concentration.
The sale begins on October 27 and will last three days, though it’s very likely the maximum cap will be reached within minutes.
Anticipating this, MegaETH has announced priority allocations for community members (Fluffle NFT holders, testnet participants, and GitHub open-source contributors).
The MEGA token is currently trading around $0.464 in Hyperliquid’s pre-market. If the sale reaches its ceiling price, participants could potentially see a 360% gain at TGE, though this figure could change before the launch.
Airdrop Opportunities on Hyperbeat’s hbUSDT YT on Pendle
Pendle’s YT (Yield Tokens) represent the “yield” portion of an asset. By purchasing a YT, you give up the principal token’s value but retain the right to earn its yield until maturity-sometimes with added incentives like airdrop points.
Hyperbeat offers various vaults (USDT, USDC, lstHYPE, UBTC, XAUt, etc.) that allocate deposits to strategies on HyperEVM to generate returns. The hbUSDT token represents a deposit into Hyperbeat’s USDT vault.
Hyperbeat’s strategies evolve over time. Currently, the vault’s funds are allocated across Hyperliquid (via HLP and delta-neutral strategies), Hyperlend, Theo, Felix, and Pendle.
The YT hbUSDT on Pendle gives exposure both to the vault’s yield and to its ongoing points campaigns. Its main advantage lies in the multiplier effect: 1 hbUSDT equals roughly 50 YT hbUSDT, allowing users to multiply point earnings by up to 50x compared to a direct deposit.
In this Alpha, we outlined how to gain exposure to this strategy and maximize participation across multiple point-based campaigns simultaneously.
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