Alpha Recap #6: Market Update, Aave App, Cap Money Airdrop and Hyperliquid’s Growth Mode

The Alpha Recap is designed to present the most important crypto market Alphas of the week. Every Friday, we bring you a condensed selection of the most valuable information from our Alpha Feed.

Reserved for OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed brings together insights, yield and airdrop strategies, as well as key market information. In other words, what defines OAK Research: curated content that goes beyond market noise.

Market Update: BTC Below $90,000, What Should You Do?

Since our Premium article from October 17, which aimed to put the first serious Bitcoin breakdown into perspective, we have been maintaining a roadmap on the state of the crypto market directly in our Alpha Feed.

The scenario played out as expected. BTC first rebounded near $98,000, retested the $107,000 resistance, then continued its decline. Since then, we have constantly updated our price targets and detailed our various scenarios.

We keep repeating it: the problem is not fundamental, it is macroeconomic. The banking and economic system is under severe stress, and all eyes are on the Fed.

Beyond the very natural fear triggered by sudden drops, our goal is not only to guide our readers and provide a relevant reading of the market, but also to show how to turn these movements into opportunity.

Aave launches its mobile app: the pivot retail needed to enter DeFi?

If you follow the Alpha Feed, this won’t really be news to you: Aave has just launched a mobile savings app promising up to 9 percent APY on your money.

Simply called “Aave App,” it allows deposits from a bank account, from a credit card, or directly in stablecoins.

With KYC, the app offers yields well above what banks or traditional fintechs propose, along with fund protection up to one million dollars per user through Umbrella, the same system that protects funds on the protocol.

According to Aave, when incentives are taken into account, yields offered by the app can reach up to 9 percent.

We already discussed this strategic pivot in the Alpha Feed more than three weeks ago, when Aave announced the acquisition of American fintech Stable. That thesis has since strengthened, as Aave recently obtained MiCAR authorization from the Central Bank of Ireland.

This is the whole purpose of the Alpha Feed: to synthesize relevant signals to go beyond the noise and anticipate new developments.

Cap Money: The best strategy to farm the airdrop

Cap is a protocol designed as a yield layer for stablecoins. It offers cUSD, a synthetic dollar backed by a basket of regulated stablecoins (USDC, PYUSD, BENJI, BUIDL) aggregated into a single reserve.

From this, Cap offers stcUSD, a staked version that unlocks access to the protocol’s yield strategies. Cap’s value proposition is to separate yield from the associated risk via a unique infrastructure.

The Frontier Program is Cap’s points campaign, designed to reward early users and prepare its deployment on MegaETH. It uses Caps, a points system distributed based on usage of cUSD, stcUSD and related DeFi integrations.

In a dedicated Alpha, we explained how to gain strategic and efficient exposure to Epoch 3 of Cap’s Frontier Program.

Because yes: to differentiate yourself, buying cUSD or stcUSD alone is not enough. Yet it is possible to earn a large number of points through a simple strategy, which we detailed in the Alpha Feed.

→ For more details, read our Early Bird analysis on Cap:

Hyperliquid unveils its “Growth Mode” for HIP-3 markets

Hyperliquid has just announced that it is now possible to deploy or boost markets based on HIP-3 with a reduction in taker fees of around 90 percent.

As a reminder, HIP-3 allows anyone to deploy a market on Hyperliquid’s infrastructure at the cost of a 500,000 HYPE deposit. Market openings follow a “Dutch auction” format, with one auction every 31 hours.

A cornerstone of Hyperliquid’s “AWS of liquidity” thesis, HIP-3 expands activity and depth on the protocol while mechanically supporting the HYPE token, via both auctions and the buyback tied to revenue.

Today, HIP-3 markets show reasonable traction, especially for tokenized equities. Tradexyz stands out here with its XYZ100, NVDA, and GOOGL markets.

However, volumes and open interest on HIP-3 markets objectively struggle to take off. This is partly due to fees being twice as high as on classic perp markets, a cost tied to financing added deployment operations.

To address these challenges, Hyperliquid introduced “Growth Mode,” a new feature intended to attract liquidity to HIP-3 markets as part of its “to house all finance” vision. We developed and contextualized this update in a dedicated Alpha.

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