祈愿88

$ENA From Sept 17, when it was $0.149, it has risen to about $0.27 now. In 10 days it jumped about 80%, and on Sept 25 alone it surged 19%.
(Binance spot, as of 02:00 Beijing time on Sept 27)
ENA has been getting criticized for almost a year: the project is very profitable, yet the token price has been stuck down. Why has it suddenly been moving up this time?
First, figure out what ENA is:
Ethena issued a stablecoin called USDe. How it makes money is this: it buys spot assets like ETH, while simultaneously opening short positions in the same amount—so that gains and losses offset each other exactly when the market moves up or down. When the market is favorable, there are more long positions, and longs have to pay the shorts a "funding fee". This money is USDe’s profit. ENA is the project’s token.

After it set a new all-time high today, I didn’t keep researching how much higher it could go. Instead, I recalculated this share buyback-and-burn model from scratch. My conclusion is this: the market is treating VVV as a “shadow equity” position in the Venice chain, but the value the token is actually capturing right now is far smaller than all the revenue the company itself generates. At roughly $23.5 per token, VVV’s circulating market cap is already about $1.13 billion, with a fully diluted valuation close to $2.7 billion. For comparison, when Venice completed its $65 million Series A round this July, the company’s valuation was $1 billion. This comparison isn’t meant to simply conclude that “VVV is overpriced.” Equity and tokens are not the same kind of asset in the first place, but it reveals how the market currently understands VVV: investors are no longer satisfied with viewing it as a tool to pay for AI inference fees. They are pre-pricing Venice’s future business growth, revenue, and cash flow.
The issue is right here. VVV holders don’t own Venice equity, and they don’t have any right to receive company profit distributions. The path for Venice’s business growth to flow into VVV is fairly direct—primarily paid subscriptions and API credits triggering buybacks and burns in the market, plus DIEM needing to lock up staked VVV. If the company earns one dollar, it doesn’t mean that dollar will all flow to the token. Today’s just-completed monthly burn very clearly illustrates this difference. In this round, a total of 16,563 VVV were burned. Based on 1,207 TWAP trades before that, the estimated inflow was about $311,000 USDC. It’s real demand, and it’s real burning—but the purchases happened in the prior month; they weren’t a single, suddenly placed order for hundreds of thousands of dollars into the market tonight.
What’s even more worth watching is the claim that “it’s already deflationary.” VVV’s current annualized emissions are about 2.5 million tokens, and the plan for October is to reduce that further to 2 million. Using the recent 24-hour subscription and API programmatic buyback speed, plus a rough annualization based on the historical monthly buyback average, I estimate the observable buyback size is roughly $7.2 million per year. $7.2 million sounds like a lot, but at a token price of $23.5, it can only buy back about 307,000 VVV—roughly 12% of the current annualized emissions. Even if business growth increases buybacks further, this order of magnitude still suggests VVV is currently in a “reducing inflation” phase, not already achieving net deflation.
There’s also a reflexivity problem: buybacks are denominated in dollars. The higher the coin price, the fewer VVV can be burned for the same amount of business revenue. Price increases will strengthen market confidence in buybacks, but they also reduce the token-supply impact of each dollar spent on buybacks. To maintain the same burn efficiency, Venice’s revenue growth must outpace VVV’s price growth.
Why is VVV still rising so hard? Because it has at least three things that most AI tokens don’t: a real AI product that is actually used, a clear pathway for revenue to enter buybacks and burns, and less than 30% of the supply that is freely circulating. The market doesn’t need to instantly buy up millions of VVV; as long as marginal demand suddenly jumps, limited liquidity is enough to drive a fast repricing.
So my mid-term view on VVV remains somewhat bullish. But the reason isn’t that “it has become a deflationary asset.” Instead, it may be turning into one of the few AI tokens with a real value-capture experiment. Today’s historic high shows the market is willing to pay in advance for this expectation. Next, it will be up to business growth and actual burn results to prove whether that close-to-$2.7 billion fully diluted valuation is discovering real value early—or has already priced in too much of the future.