Market Briefing 2: Bitcoin (BTC) Stalls Under $66K, Ether (ETH) Holds Up Ahead of the Fed
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HYAlpha Recap #25: Reviewing HIP-4, Strategy Ready to Sell BTC, and Changes to Ethena’s USDe
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In this new edition of the Alpha Recap, we break down the week’s most important insights across crypto markets: major developments, yield and airdrop strategies, key market information, and concise analysis designed to cut through the noise.
The Alpha Recap is designed to highlight the most important developments in the crypto market each week. Every Friday, we deliver a curated overview of the most valuable insights from our Alpha Feed.
Reserved for OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed brings together market insights, yield and airdrop strategies, as well as key information shaping the crypto landscape. In other words, it reflects OAK Research’s core philosophy: delivering curated content that goes beyond market noise.
Strategy May Sell BTC: Should the Market Be Concerned?
This week, one particular statement drew significant attention: Strategy, the largest and oldest Bitcoin treasury company, could eventually sell part of its BTC holdings. In reality, it now appears to be more a matter of probability than mere possibility.
“We’re not going to sit here and say we’ll never sell Bitcoin,” Michael Saylor recently stated.
The reaction was immediate. Over the years, Saylor has become synonymous with the “never sell” philosophy among retail investors, making the statement feel like a major shift in tone.
In practice, however, the possibility of BTC sales has never truly been absent from Strategy’s framework. The company has repeatedly acknowledged it through SEC filings as well as statements from CEO Phong Le.
So what should actually be taken away from this? Did Michael Saylor simply overstate things? Is Strategy genuinely preparing to sell BTC, or does this remain a purely theoretical possibility? And perhaps more importantly, if such sales were to happen, what purpose would they serve?
We addressed all of these questions in detail in this week’s dedicated Alpha.
HIP-4: Understanding Hyperliquid’s Latest Evolution
Last weekend, Hyperliquid deployed its very first HIP-4 market on mainnet. The initial market allowed users to speculate on BTC price direction, followed shortly after by another market enabling traders to bet on multiple BTC price outcomes at a specific point in time.
For context, HIP-4 introduces binary markets, meaning contracts that settle between 0 and 1. In practice, this opens the door to both prediction markets and option-like structures.
One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding HIP-4 is the idea that Hyperliquid is now directly competing with platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi. In reality, the implications go far beyond that. Hyperliquid is not simply a trading platform, it is fundamentally an infrastructure layer, particularly through its Builder Codes framework.
In other words, HIP-4 primarily acts as a gateway allowing specialized third-party applications to plug directly into Hyperliquid, much like what previously happened with HIP-3. There is little need to revisit how successful that model has already become, the growth of platforms like TradeXYZ speaks for itself.
Beyond prediction markets, HIP-4 also introduces the possibility of integrating options trading directly into Hyperliquid’s ecosystem. While options are a deeply established instrument in traditional finance, they have historically struggled to scale efficiently in crypto due to structural limitations.
Hyperliquid’s architecture changes that dynamic by integrating these mechanisms into a unified framework where every component interacts seamlessly, particularly through cross-margin functionality.
This week, we explored the broader implications of HIP-4 through two detailed Alpha reports.
USDe: How Gold Could Become Part of Ethena’s Collateral Framework
Yesterday, Ethena published a detailed article explaining why it wants to integrate tokenized gold basis trading into USDe’s backing mechanism.
We took a deep dive into this proposal, which builds on research conducted jointly by Kairos Research and Blockworks, to explain why we believe this strategic pivot makes sense for Ethena.
How Ethena’s basis trade strategy works, how USDe’s collateral structure evolved throughout different market cycles, why tokenized gold has become an attractive expansion vector, and what this could concretely bring to USDe: all of these topics were covered in today’s dedicated Alpha.
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