Alpha Recap #25: Reviewing HIP-4, Strategy Ready to Sell BTC, and Changes to Ethena’s USDe
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HYAlpha Recap #8: HYPE unlocks, Nunchi’s points campaign, Kinetiq’s DEX and Almanak’s TGE
December 5, 2025
In this new edition of the Alpha Recap, we review the main insights of the week in the crypto market: major news, yield and airdrop strategies, key information and fast analyses to cut through the noise.
The Alpha Recap highlights the most important Alphas of the crypto market each week. Every Friday, we bring a condensed selection of high-value insights sourced from our Alpha Feed.
Reserved for OAK Premium members, the Alpha Feed gathers insights, yield and airdrop strategies, and key market information. In other words, the essence of OAK Research: filtered content that goes beyond the noise.
HYPE unlocks have begun: what should we take away from it?
November 29 marked an important date for Hyperliquid. One year after the launch of HYPE, Core Contributor unlocks have officially begun. The market had been anticipating this event for months, concerned about the potential impact of such a large release on the token’s dynamics.
In theory, 238 million HYPE (23.8 percent of supply) will be released progressively until October 2027, at a rate of 2.6 million units per week. Until now, these tokens were locked and staked since November 2024, without generating yield.
Data from this first week turned out to be far more constructive than expected, since the majority of tokens were restaked by the team.
These data points should not be extrapolated too quickly. Three years of successive unlocks still lie ahead, and the market will need to distinguish structural financing from true misalignment.
If any team has shown its ability to manage these dilemmas without damaging its ecosystem, it is Hyperliquid. But as of today, unlocks become a permanent parameter of the HYPE token and something that will need to be monitored closely.
Nunchi launches a points campaign on Hyperliquid: what you need to know
This week, we also covered the points campaign launched by Nunchi. Built on Hyperliquid, Nunchi aims to become a DEX where users can trade yield directly: perpetual funding rates, Treasury bill yields, or any other tokenised cash flow.
To finance its markets via HIP-3, Nunchi offers users the ability to stake HYPE in exchange for nHYPE, its own liquid staking token. The campaign incentivises the use of nHYPE in exchange for points that explicitly signal a future airdrop.
In our dedicated Alpha, we detailed the campaign and, more importantly, how to take advantage of it.
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Kinetiq will launch Markets: towards a new model of revenue-sharing DEX?
Kinetiq has unveiled Markets, the first DEX launched via Kinetiq Launch, its “exchange-as-a-service” framework.
The idea behind Launch is simple: allow any protocol to deploy a DEX on Hyperliquid without locking the 500,000 HYPE required by HIP-3. Launch provides isolated staking pools materialised as exLSTs, which act as deposits and align each exchange with its own set of stakers.
Markets therefore inaugurates the first project produced through Launch. Using USDH as the quote asset for its future pairs, Markets is positioned as an entry point into a new generation of fully on-chain markets where any asset can be expressed as a perpetual contract.
The release of Markets is closely linked to that of kmHYPE, its dedicated exLST. The main interest of this new token is that it captures 10 percent of the revenues generated by Markets. This portion of the DEX revenues will be distributed directly to token holders.
kmHYPE can be obtained in exchange for kHYPE, pro-rated according to the amount of KNTQ held by users. Exchanges will be possible on December 8.
By introducing revenue sharing through kmHYPE, Kinetiq sets a precedent: every new DEX launched via Launch will need to offer more attractive incentives to stand out and attract users. As we have often stressed at OAK Research, competition in any market segment ultimately benefits users.
Almanak announces its TGE date and unveils the “Almanak Games”
Almanak’s TGE will take place on December 11, with nearly 15 percent of the total supply distributed to participants of the various points campaigns conducted throughout the year. After a pre-season and three Stages, the airdrop opens a new phase for the protocol where the main challenge will be avoiding the now-common scenario of tokens collapsing within hours of launch.
To address this, Almanak has introduced “The Pledge Movement”, a program encouraging future holders to keep their tokens until the end of the year in exchange for various incentives.
This effort works hand-in-hand with the Almanak Games, which will run from December 11 to January 31, 2026, distributing up to 1 million USDC and 3 percent of the ALMANAK supply. The objective is to spark real activity around the token and the protocol’s products immediately after the TGE in order to prevent an immediate price breakdown, a pattern that has affected almost every token launched in recent months.
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