Lying around near $0.08 ten days ago, today it already touched $0.189—ENA has surged 130% this round, but this isn’t a typical altcoin rebound.

On August 27, the Ethena Foundation rolled out four changes. The core is that it personally defused the ticking time bomb of “VC unlocking on a monthly basis” that has been hanging over everyone’s heads for two years.

The foundation has bought out a portion of the seed-round investors’ still-unlocked tokens—investors who sold coins over the past nine months.

Even more drastic: all future VC monthly unlocks will be canceled, and the remaining investors’ tokens will be released all at once on October 5.

The governance proposal also plans to use 95% of the protocol’s net revenue to buy back ENA. It will start when the USDe supply reaches $7.5 billion, and then the percentage will increase as the scale grows.

But the USDe supply has already fallen from $15 billion to below $5 billion—still a way off from the $7.5 billion trigger. That one-time release on October 5 is also a weight of sell-pressure.

So is this rally driven by expectations, or can it truly flip the fee switch and get it running? We’ll find out on October 5.