📺 CRYPTO DAILY | EPISODE 32
💵 ETHENA (ENA) — THE PROJECT THAT TURNED THE FUTURES MARKET INTO A DOLLAR-MAKING MACHINE REACHED US$ 15 BILLION, AND NOW IT WANTS TO TAKE THE SAME STRATEGY TO STOCKS
Imagine creating a “dollar” without having to keep each unit simply as US$ 1 sitting idle in a bank account.
Instead, you buy assets, open offsetting positions in the derivatives market to neutralize price fluctuations, and try to capture the yield generated between staking, interest, and futures markets.
Does that sound complicated?
Because it is.
And from that very engineering came one of today’s most discussed DeFi projects: Ethena.
Its main product, USDe, managed to surpass US$ 15 billion in circulation at its peak, and in September 2026 it’s again near US$ 4.9 billion. The protocol claims it has moved more than US$ 30 billion through its issuance and redemption systems. Ethena Pay
But there’s one fundamental difference we need to understand from the start:
USDe is not ENA.
USDe is the synthetic dollar.
ENA is the governance token of the ecosystem.
And understanding this difference is essential to grasp both the opportunity and the project’s risks.
👨💼 GUY YOUNG — FROM TRADITIONAL FINANCE TO A “DOLLAR” OUTSIDE BANKS
Ethena was founded in 2023 by Guy Young.
Before fully entering crypto, Young spent years working in traditional finance, including investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity.
The idea that guided Ethena targeted an interesting contradiction in DeFi itself:
how to build a parallel financial system if the most important asset in that system — the dollar — still depends on traditional banks?
In July 2023, Ethena exited stealth mode after raising about US$ 6 million in a round led by Dragonfly, with participation from people connected to the derivatives market and Arthur Hayes, founder of BitMEX. The Block
Hayes had an important intellectual influence in this story. The idea of using derivatives to create a synthetic dollar had appeared in his writings about the so-called “Internet Bond.”
Ethena would turn part of that thesis into a product.
💵 FEBRUARY 2024 — THE USDe IS BORN
USDe was publicly launched in February 2024.
But it doesn’t work like USDT or USDC.
In a traditional stablecoin backed by fiat currency, the basic model is relatively simple: there are dollars, government bonds, or liquid equivalents held as reserves against the issued tokens.
Ethena chose another path.
The protocol holds backing assets and uses positions in derivatives to reduce exposure to fluctuations in those assets.
Imagine, in simplified terms:
Ethena has US$ 100 million in ETH.
At the same time, it opens about US$ 100 million in short positions in ETH derivatives.
If ETH rises, the asset rises in value, but the short position loses.
If ETH drops, the asset loses value, but the short tends to gain.
The goal is to make these two forces neutralize each other.
It’s the famous one:
DELTA-NEUTRAL.
That’s the engineering that helps USDe seek stability near US$ 1. Ethena Docs
💰 SO WHERE DOES THE YIELD COME FROM?
Here’s one of the most interesting parts of Ethena.
The protocol can generate revenue mainly through three sources:
ETH staking;
funding rates and futures market basis;
yields from stable liquid assets held in backing.
When there’s high demand for long positions in perpetual contracts, long traders often pay funding to those who are short.
And who’s short?
Among other participants, Ethena’s own strategy.
That is: a position created to protect USDe can also generate revenue.
Those who turn USDe into sUSDe can participate in the protocol’s rewards mechanism. But this yield is variable — there is no guaranteed fixed fee. Ethena Docs
🚀 APRIL 2024 — ENA ARRIVES
On April 2, 2024, the ENA token began distribution and trading.
The first major distribution allocated 750 million ENA — 5% of the total 15 billion supply — to participants in the “shards” campaign.
Binance also launched ENA via Launchpool and opened trading on the same day. Binance
ENA was born mainly as a governance token.
Token holders can participate in decisions involving risk parameters, accepted assets, incentives, and ecosystem evolution.
But there’s a question that would follow ENA ever since:
if Ethena wins billions, how does that value reach the token?
This question would become very important in 2026.
📈 THE HYPE WAS ALMOST IMMEDIATE
ENA reached the market during a phase of enormous enthusiasm around USDe.
In just nine days after it started trading, it reached its all-time high:
US$ 1.52 on April 11, 2024.
But what rose quickly would also face a brutal correction.
The all-time low would be recorded on June 30, 2026:
approximately US$ 0.070.
A drop of more than 95% from the peak.
On September 25, 2026, ENA is again in the approximate US$ 0.22 region, with market cap near US$ 2.2 billion and around 10 billion tokens in circulation. CoinGecko
⚠️ THE RISK EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT
From the start, critics pointed to a potential weakness:
what if funding rates stay negative for a long time?
In this scenario, instead of receiving funding from its short positions, the strategy might need to pay.
Ethena created a Reserve Fund precisely as an additional protection layer for adverse funding periods and extraordinary market situations. Ethena Governance
There are still other risks:
counterparty failure;
problems on exchanges;
custody;
liquidity;
derivatives;
smart contracts;
a mismatch between assets and hedge positions.
Ethena claims the backing isn’t directly deposited on the exchanges used for hedging. Custodians and MPC wallet providers allow the assets to be used as collateral without being directly exposed to the exchanges’ balance sheets. The documentation also states that periodic attestations of the backing are performed. Ethena Docs
💥 OCTOBER 10, 2025 — USDe REACHES US$ 0.65 ON BINANCE
So a real test came.
During the massive liquidation wave of October 10, 2025, the USDe/USDT pair briefly reached approximately US$ 0.6567 on Binance.
At first glance, it seemed like a disaster.
But there was an important detail.
The distortion was concentrated mainly in that market.
On Curve, the USDe/USDC briefly fell to only about US$ 0.997, while Ethena’s primary issuance and redemption system continued running and processed more than US$ 2 billion in redemptions over 24 hours.
The subsequent analysis attributed much of the extreme drop on Binance to liquidity issues, pricing mechanisms, and the difficulty for market makers to carry out arbitrage during the chaos.
This doesn’t eliminate risk.
On the contrary: it showed that an asset can be solvent and still suffer a massive temporary price distortion on a specific exchange. Ethena Governance
🏦 USDtb — ETHENA TAKES THE REVERSE ROAD
There’s an interesting irony in this story.
Ethena was born trying to create a dollar that wouldn’t depend on traditional banking infrastructure.
Then it also created USDtb.
Unlike USDe, USDtb uses high-liquidity reserves, including assets linked to U.S. Treasury securities and BlackRock’s tokenized BUIDL fund.
In 2026, Anchorage Digital Bank began issuing USDtb under U.S. federal supervision. Anchorage Digital
So Ethena began operating two very different models:
USDe → synthetic dollar based on hedge strategies.
USDtb → structured stablecoin for a regulated financial environment.
💰 US$ 100 MILLION FROM THE BIG NAMES OF WALL STREET
In 2025, Ethena raised US$ 100 million through a private sale of ENA.
Investors included Franklin Templeton, Polychain, Pantera, Dragonfly, and F-Prime, tied to Fidelity’s ecosystem.
The capital would be used to expand Ethena’s infrastructure and develop products aimed at the institutional market. The Block
The project that started by trying to reduce reliance on the traditional financial system was now beginning to attract some of the biggest names in that system.
📱 2026 — ETHENA WANTS TO BECOME SOMETHING BIGGER THAN A DEFI PROTOCOL
In September 2026, Ethena Pay emerged.
The proposal is far more ambitious than simply offering a stablecoin.
The product tries to work like a financial account experience: store money, transfer, spend, and receive rewards using USDe under the hood of the infrastructure.
Ethena says the service launched on iOS in about 50 countries and uses Avalanche as its blockchain infrastructure. Ethena Pay
But one piece was still missing.
📈 SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 — ETHENA ENTERS TOKENIZED STOCKS
And we reach the most recent development in this episode.
Ethena announced the expansion of the USDe backing strategy to tokenized American stocks.
The mechanism uses Binance bStocks as the spot side of the trade and perpetual equity contracts as a hedge.
It’s the same fundamental delta-neutral logic applied to a completely different market.
Before:
crypto + derivatives.
Now:
tokenized stocks + stock derivatives.
According to Ethena, Binance already has more than US$ 2.9 billion in open interest in perpetual futures tied to equities.
Guy Young called this expansion one of the biggest changes to the USDe funding mechanism since the start of the project. The Block
This opens up an enormous possibility.
Ethena stops relying only on the crypto derivatives market to find basis opportunities and also starts exploring markets tied to traditional equities.
But it also adds new layers of risk involving issuers of tokenized assets, exchange infrastructure, and liquidity in those markets.
🔥 AND FINALLY: CAN ENA CAPTURE REVENUE?
This may be the most important change for anyone who follows the token.
In August 2026, Ethena presented a redesign involving investors, intellectual property, and value capture by ENA.
In September, governance approved a new fee switch mechanism.
The model envisions that ENA buybacks will be triggered as the USDe supply reaches certain thresholds.
The first level starts at US$ 7.5 billion of USDe.
Then there are levels at US$ 10 billion, US$ 15 billion, and US$ 20 billion.
Therefore, there is an essential difference:
the mechanism was approved, but buybacks depend on the defined triggers. Ethena Governance
With USDe currently near US$ 4.9 billion, the first big trigger hasn’t been reached yet. stables.cool
📊 NUMBERS THAT MATTER
ENA launched: Apr 2, 2024
Max supply: 15 billion ENA
ATH: US$ 1.52 — Apr 11, 2024
ATL: ~US$ 0.070 — Jun 30, 2026
Price on Sep 25, 2026: ~US$ 0.22
Market cap: ~US$ 2.2 billion
Current USDe: ~US$ 4.9 billion
USDe all-time peak: ~US$ 14.8–15 billion
First trigger of the new buyback model: US$ 7.5 billion of USDe CoinGecko
⚖️ IS IT WORTH INVESTING IN ENA? WHAT NEEDS TO BE WATCHED
The bullish thesis is in USDe’s growth, integration with major exchanges and protocols, institutional entry, regulated USDtb, Ethena Pay, and now the expansion of the delta-neutral strategy to tokenized stocks.
The new buyback mechanism also creates a potentially more direct link between the ecosystem’s economic growth and ENA.
But that doesn’t automatically make ENA a low-risk investment.
The token has already fallen more than 95% from the ATH to its all-time low. USDe depends on a much more complex architecture than a stablecoin simply backed by cash and Treasuries. Funding rates, derivatives, custodians, exchanges, liquidity, and counterparties remain relevant.
And the buyback mechanism itself depends on USDe growth.
This is perhaps the most interesting part of the thesis:
ENA doesn’t depend only on the market buying ENA.
It depends on whether the economic machine built around USDe keeps growing.
🗓️ TIMELINE
2023: Ethena Labs is founded by Guy Young
Jul/2023: seed round of about US$ 6 million
Feb/2024: public launch of USDe
Apr 2, 2024: ENA launch and airdrop
Apr 11, 2024: ENA hits an ATH of US$ 1.52
2024: USDe grows rapidly and moves to the center of DeFi
2025: Ethena raises US$ 100 million with institutional investors
Oct/2025: USDe surpasses US$ 14 billion in supply and faces severe dislocation on Binance during a crash
Jun 30, 2026: ENA records an all-time low near US$ 0.070
Aug/2026: Ethena announces restructuring and a buyback proposal
Sep/2026: governance approves a new fee switch
Sep/2026: Ethena Pay launches
Sep 25, 2026: Ethena expands its delta-neutral strategy to tokenized stocks on Binance
CLOSING
Ethena started trying to answer a seemingly impossible question:
is it possible to create a scalable dollar inside the crypto universe without simply putting a traditional dollar in a bank account for each token issued?
In just a little over two years, the answer went from being only an experiment.
USDe got close to US$ 15 billion.
Then it fell to less than a third of that size.
It survived one of the biggest liquidation waves in recent market history.
Attracted institutional capital.
Created a second regulated stablecoin.
Entered payments.
And now it’s taking its strategy to tokenized stocks.
Maybe the big question of Episode #32 isn’t whether Ethena can grow.
It has already proven it can.
The question is harder:
can a derivatives-based system, with funding, custody, and arbitrage, become global financial infrastructure without turning its efficiency into a complexity that’s too big to control?
This response is still being written.
#ENA #ethena #EthenaLabs #DocumentarioIndependente #BinanceSquare
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Educational and informational content only. It does not constitute investment advice. The cryptocurrency market is highly volatile. Always do your own research (DYOR).
Sources consulted: Ethena, Ethena Governance, Ethena Foundation, Binance Research, Anchorage Digital, CoinGecko, The Block, CoinDesk, DeFiLlama, and public market data.
Crypto Daily | Episode #32 of many.
A documentary about the money of the future — told today.