Alpha Recap #27: SpaceX is on TradeXYZ, Polymarket launches pre-IPO markets, and an opportunity on Pendle

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.

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Polymarket launches pre-IPO markets: a direct rival to Hyperliquid?

This week, we analyzed the partnership announced between Polymarket and Nasdaq Private Market, which opens up a new range of prediction markets focused on pre-IPOs. OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, SpaceX, and Kraken are among the companies it will now be possible to speculate on directly on the platform.

The question that immediately came up is how this competes with TradeXYZ, the main HIP-3 deployer on Hyperliquid, which had opened up precisely this pre-IPO vertical back in May. In a dedicated Alpha, we broke down in detail why these two players are in fact less rivals than complements, leaning on a fundamental difference that tends to get underestimated: the structure of the payoff.

We also drew a parallel with HIP-4, Hyperliquid's next financial primitive, and explained how its architecture opens up a far wider space than what Polymarket offers today. It's something that meaningfully shifts how this announcement should be read, and it leads us to a clear conclusion on which of the two ecosystems starts with a head start in this race for on-chain pre-IPO markets.

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SpaceX: price discovery for the largest IPO in history is happening on Hyperliquid

One of the biggest announcements of the past 10 days was SpaceX's plan to go public. Elon Musk's company intends to raise $75 billion, roughly 2.5 times the previous record held by Saudi Aramco, in what could become the largest IPO in history.

Beyond the event itself, what really deserves attention is what unfolded around the announcement. Shortly after it broke, TradeXYZ launched a pre-IPO market on SpaceX, letting the market immediately begin producing a form of price discovery around the company, even before its official listing.

In an Alpha published earlier this week, we took a close look at the mechanics of these synthetic markets and at what fundamentally sets them apart from a classic perp.

Now more than just a speculative product, on-chain pre-IPO markets are gradually starting to behave like a parallel information layer, capable of producing a continuous valuation signal on companies that are still private.

If this dynamic holds, particularly through the SpaceX IPO, these markets could end up influencing far more than just the pricing of the perps themselves, including how investors, employees, and private markets perceive a company's true value before it goes public.

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limUSD: 20 to 30% APY with a very simple LP

We mentioned it to our Premium subscribers two weeks ago: Liminal recently launched limUSD, a yield-bearing token whose base price moves according to the returns generated by the protocol's various building blocks, namely xHYPE, xBTC, and xLEND.

If we're coming back to it this week, it's because the limUSD LP posted a yield of nearly 32% on Pendle (now normalized around 20%), an opportunity that was worth a closer look.

In a dedicated Alpha, we detailed the precise makeup of this yield, the mechanisms behind it, and above all the conditions that allow it to hold at this level, because as is often the case with this type of pool, several parameters can quickly change the picture.

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