Alpha Recap #35: Google Earnings, Permissionless HIP-4 and Launchpads on the Robinhood Chain
Hyperliquid (HYPE), HOOD
Alpha Recap 39: Robinhood Opportunity, CHIP Buyback and TxFlow Analysis
Published on
In this new edition of the Alpha Recap, we cover the week's key highlights from the crypto market: major news, yield or airdrop strategies, essential updates, and quick takes, to help you cut through the noise.
The Alpha Recap brings you the most important crypto market Alphas of the week. Every Friday, we deliver a digest of the most valuable insights from our Alpha Feed.
Exclusive to OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed brings together insights, yield and airdrop strategies, and key market intelligence. In other words, it captures what defines OAK Research: filtered content that cuts through the market noise.
Lighter x Robinhood: $36M in LIT Still Up for Grabs
In August, we covered the points program Lighter+14.32% launched alongside its integration into Robinhood Wallet, with 11 million LIT set aside for the Robinhood community. At the time, the allocation was worth around $25M.
Since then, the token has climbed significantly, notably on Tuesday after the DEX announced it had applied for a license with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the airdrop is now worth nearly $36M.
The campaign mechanics remain unchanged. Every trade on Lighter Robinhood Chain earns points credited in real time based on volume, open positions and fees paid, plus a weekly drop distributed every Friday. That drop grows by 5,000 points each week and reached 110,000 points last week. All points will be converted into LIT at the end of the campaign, for which no date has been announced yet.
That said, the early-entry window has now closed. Daily volume on Lighter Robinhood Chain, which topped out around $5M before the announcement, has surpassed $570M over 24 hours, heavily diluting the points distribution.
Yet with the same volume, two farmers can walk away with very different results: Lighter has documented several multipliers tied to the interface used, hedging positions on Lighter Core, or trading equity markets during earnings season, and some of them stack.
→ In our Alpha, we break down how each boost works, walk through a concrete example of how to combine them, and estimate the value of a point depending on when the campaign ends.
USD.AI Wants to Put Its Revenue Toward CHIP Buybacks
On Wednesday, USD.AI proposed allocating all of the net interest margin (NIM) generated by sUSDai to buying back its CHIP token, after deducting the CHIP Foundation's costs. At the time of writing, the measure is still pending governance approval.
As a reminder, the protocol finances GPU operators through loans backed by their hardware. Holders of sUSDai, the staked version of USDai, earn the interest on these loans as well as the yield on PYUSD reserves. USD.AI keeps 10%, a share that would now go toward CHIP buybacks.
Other revenue follows a separate split: origination fees, ranging from 2% to 3% of the loan amount, go to USD.AI Inc., as does 60% of the gains realized when loans are sold to institutional investors via GLX. The remaining 40% funds a reserve designed to guarantee sUSDai a minimum yield of 7%.
A second source of buybacks is also being considered, drawn from the margin taken on all loans settled in USDai, including those that are sold on. However, this measure will only go to a vote once the lending business has matured, with $20B in outstanding loans as the benchmark threshold, compared to the $660M claimed today.
→ In a dedicated Alpha, we estimated the annual amount these buybacks could represent relative to CHIP's supply and the pace of reward emissions, and identified the key milestones to watch through April 2027.
TxFlow: Our Take on the Perp DEX Accused of Copying Hyperliquid
TxFlow is a trading-focused Layer 1 blockchain that launched on mainnet in late March with a fully on-chain order book perp DEX. In practice, the platform offers perps on crypto, US stocks, gold, forex and pre-IPO companies. Founded by Matt Hu, CEO of the centralized exchange BloFin, the project has no token yet and is running a points campaign, whose Season 1 kicked off on October 12 following a retroactive Season 0.
On Tuesday, analyst 0xJaehaerys published a thread, viewed more than 145,000 times, accusing TxFlow of largely copying Hyperliquid. According to some analyses, only five lines out of 843 differ between TxFlow's bridge contract on Arbitrum and Hyperliquid's Bridge2. The fee schedule also uses the same rates at every tier, while the website of TxRelay, the project's tokenization layer, even mentioned Unit, Hyperliquid's spot trading infrastructure for BTC and ETH.
The next day, the team acknowledged reusing Hyperliquid's bridge and API to make integration easier for builders in its ecosystem, while maintaining that it developed its consensus and matching engine in-house.
But what's the real story? Does TxFlow have potential, or is it just a copycat?
→ In our Alpha, we analyzed how the blockchain works, from its validators to its oracle and bridge, as well as its growth strategy and points campaign.
