Alpha Recap #30: HYPE Hits a New ATH, the Fed Shifts Course, and Binance Faces Pressure in Europe
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HYAlpha Recap #31: Squid’s public sale, Binance pushed out of the EU, and Zama’s confidential vault
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In this new edition of the Alpha Recap, we cover the week's key insights across the crypto market: major news, yield and airdrop strategies, important data points, and quick analysis - all designed to cut through the noise.
The Alpha Recap is designed to highlight the most important crypto market alphas of the week. Every Friday, we bring you a concise breakdown of the most valuable insights from our Alpha Feed.
Reserved for OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed gathers market insights, yield and airdrop strategies, as well as key information across the crypto landscape. In short, it reflects the core DNA of OAK Research: delivering curated content that cuts through the market noise.
$QUID public sale: worth participating?
Squid has officially announced the public sale of its native token, $QUID, set to take place from June 30 to July 3 through Kraken Launch and Legion. Native to Base with a total supply of one billion tokens, the sale will be accessible through both platforms. Allocation will depend either on your activity on Squid if you participate through Legion, or on your Kraken activity if you choose Kraken Launch.
At this stage, we only know that $QUID will be stakeable, used for protocol governance, and may eventually be integrated into a buyback mechanism. More detailed tokenomics are expected to be released tomorrow.
On paper, Squid checks several important boxes: a working product with no security incidents to date, compatibility across more than one hundred blockchains, and strong integrations with partners such as Hedera and Celo.
That said, these fundamentals alone do not automatically make the sale attractive. The broader market remains fragile, and most recent TGEs have struggled to deliver convincing performance.
That’s why, in a dedicated Alpha, we took a deep dive into Squid’s model and the value proposition behind its upcoming token to assess whether participating actually makes sense.
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The end of the road for Binance in the EU
It is now official. Having failed to secure its MiCA license in time, Binance will no longer be able to legally offer crypto services in France and across the wider European Union starting July 1. The platform has withdrawn its application in Greece and is now hoping to obtain approval through France, although such validation is unlikely to happen for several more months. For European users, the timeline is now clear.
In the short term, if you are a Binance user, there is no immediate concern regarding your funds, which remain accessible and withdrawable at all times. However, a large share of Binance’s services, from Spot and Earn to Launchpool, staking, bots, and recurring buy plans, will be disabled. Beyond convenience, staying on an unlicensed platform also means giving up the protections MiCA was specifically designed to provide.
This is exactly why, at OAK Research, we made the decision to work with only one centralized exchange: Bybit EU. We are in regular contact with their teams, have been closely following their regulatory strategy in Europe for months, and they already hold a MiCA license. At this stage, we believe this makes them one of the strongest options for European investors looking to avoid regulatory uncertainty.
Zama launches the first confidential USDC vault on Ethereum
This week, Zama, in partnership with Morpho and Steakhouse Financial, launched the very first fully confidential yield product for USDC on Ethereum.
The integration allows users to deposit either USDC or cUSDC, Zama’s encrypted version of the asset, into the Steakhouse USDC Prime Vault to generate yield while keeping wallet activity private.
In practice, deposits are pooled together with those of other users before being sent in batches into the vault every 24 hours. While the transaction itself remains visible on-chain, each user’s individual share allocation stays private. In other words, users can earn yield from the vault without publicly exposing their position, which is exactly the core value proposition of the product.
What makes this particularly interesting is that, in theory, the same privacy layer could eventually be applied to many other parts of on-chain finance, whether swaps, staking, or even governance.
Launched on Monday, the vault has already attracted $5.83 million in deposits and is currently offering a 27.75% APY. That yield is temporarily boosted by incentives, which will gradually phase out by mid-September.
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