Alpha Recap #36: SK Hynix Buyback, Fed Repos, and BaseApp Adopts Hyperliquid

The Alpha Recap aims to bring you the most important Alphas from the crypto market each week. Every Friday, we offer a digest of the most valuable insights from our Alpha Feed.

Reserved for OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed brings together insights, yield and airdrop strategies, and key market information. In short, this is the DNA of OAK Research: filtered content that goes beyond market noise.

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SK Hynix: $28.6B Buyback Announced, Unprecedented in Korea

SK Hynix announced this week a share buyback program worth 40 trillion won, or roughly $28.6 billion, with the repurchased shares to be cancelled immediately. In total, 24 million shares, representing 3.3% of share capital, will be bought back between August 20 and November 19 before being permanently cancelled.

Put simply, this is the largest program of its kind ever carried out by a listed company in Korea. Alongside this announcement, the group is also raising its shareholder return target, now set at at least 50% of cumulative free cash flow over 2025-2027, up from up to 50% previously.

For context, SK Hynix's decision comes after the stock fell nearly 50% from its June peak, amid the Korean market crash and persistent doubts about the sustainability of the memory cycle.

Ultimately, a signal like this, however massive, never settles a valuation debate on its own. The real question raised by this buyback is whether SK Hynix still deserves to be priced as a classic cyclical stock, or whether AI-driven demand has shifted the picture enough to justify a radically different read.

→ Our dedicated Alpha takes a closer look at SK Hynix's valuation, what this buyback tells us about the group's financial position and upcoming earnings, and our take on the Korean market crash.

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US Treasury Doubles Down on Bond Buybacks, Crypto Rallies

On August 19, the US Treasury caught markets somewhat off guard by announcing it would double its long-term bond buybacks, raising the cap from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation on 10- to 30-year maturities, between September 9 and November 4. The announcement came a day after the 30-year yield spiked to around 5.33%, its highest level since 2007, at a time when the US bond market had already been under pressure for several weeks.

The reaction was immediate: the 30-year yield fell by about 9 basis points to 5.20%, while gold, silver, and Bitcoin all accelerated higher. BTC climbed back above $71,000 in the process (and has since topped $79,000 today), its highest level since early June, in a move further amplified by more than $3 billion in short position liquidations.

What's rather striking, in fact, is the gap between the actual size of the operation and the scale of the market's reaction. Indeed, these buybacks remain tiny relative to the more than $32 trillion in outstanding US debt. And contrary to what's been suggested, this isn't quantitative easing in the strict sense: the Treasury is restructuring its existing debt, not creating new money.

→ In our Alpha, we dig into what this intervention really says about the management of long-term rates, how it fits into our two other macro threads, and above all what it could mean for scarce assets like gold and Bitcoin.

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Hyperliquid to Power Perps Infrastructure for BaseApp

BaseApp, Coinbase's consumer app, has just integrated Hyperliquid's perps directly into its interface. As a result, more than 290 markets are now accessible there, ranging from cryptocurrencies to tokenized stocks and commodities, with up to 50x leverage. In other words, everything happens within BaseApp for the user, while execution is handled entirely by Hyperliquid through its Builder Codes.

BaseApp already offered perps via Avantis, but those products never really took off, as Jesse Pollak himself acknowledged before handing the app's reins over to Cobie. Notably, Cobie has long been a supporter of Hyperliquid, which very likely played a role in this shift in strategy.

While this announcement might seem somewhat paradoxical given that Hyperliquid is, in the end, a competitor to Coinbase, it's worth remembering that the exchange became USDC's treasury deployer on Hyperliquid a few months ago. This should therefore be seen as an extension of that partnership, which is a good sign.

BaseApp now finds itself competing with Fomo in social trading, but both apps run on the same engine under the hood: Hyperliquid. More specifically, Fomo goes through TradeXYZ, while BaseApp uses Builder Codes directly.

Ultimately, no matter which app captures the end user, Hyperliquid captures a share of the value generated by volume, which is one more proof that its infrastructure is gradually becoming the "AWS of liquidity" we've been talking about for a while now.

→ In a dedicated Alpha, we took a closer look at how Builder Codes work, their growing weight in Hyperliquid's revenue, and why this battle ultimately benefits just one player.

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