Foreword: 8 % on DAI, 12 % on sUSDe
In August 2023 Spark, MakerDAO’s lending arm, briefly offered an 8 % APY on DAI. Justin Sun swept in with 230 k stETH—at one point 15 % of Spark’s deposits—forcing an emergency vote that cut the rate to 5 %. What was meant to be a subsidy for DAI usage almost became Sun’s personal yield farm.

Two years later, in July 2025, Ethena is running a “coin-stock-bond” treasury strategy that has pushed sUSDe’s headline yield to ~12 % and sent ENA up 20 % in a day. Born in the Bitcoin treasury-meta, Ethena’s playbook has leap-frogged tickers like SBET and BMNR and finally landed on USDe. Once again, the protocol has weaponized capital markets to spin a two-sided flywheel for both ENA and USDe.

The Dual-Token Deathmatch
USDT invented stablecoins; USDC captured the compliance mindshare; USDe is the capital trap. When ENA’s treasury strategy went live, my instinct was “another copy-paste of the Strategy meta.” A closer look suggests Ethena is actually trying to break the curse that haunts every dual-token stablecoin:

You must choose: either pump the governance token’s price or grow the stablecoin’s market share—you can’t have both.

• Aave pumped AAVE +83 % in three months, yet GHO only prints $300 M.

• MakerDAO’s rebrand to Sky lifted SKY +43 %, while USDS sits at $7.5 B.

• ENA is +94 %, and USDe already matches USDS at $7.6 B.

Add the Luna-UST meltdown and the pattern is clear: limited protocol revenue forces a zero-sum choice between token price and stablecoin supply. USDT, as the first mover, never had to choose; Circle shares profits with partners but never with USDC holders.

Ethena sidesteps this by bribing centralized exchanges with ENA call-options on future profits. For now, big holders, investors and CEXs have been placated, while USDe holders keep the dividend priority. According to A1 Research, Ethena has already returned ~$400 M to USDe holders via sUSDe, vaulting over the moat dug by USDT/USDC.

StablecoinX: A Treasury Unlike the Others
Treasury plays to date fall into four molds:

1. BTC treasury (e.g., Strategy) – Long BTC; 600 k BTC is rocket fuel on the way up, an anchor on the way down.

2. ETH treasury (e.g., BMNR) – Attempt to corner 5 % of supply, emulate Sun-style equity games.

3. BNB/SOL/HYPE treasuries – Foundations or single entities buy their own token to juice price—the laziest form of reflexivity.

4. StablecoinX – ENA’s twist. On paper, an on-chain entity raises $260 M to buy 8 % of circulating ENA, a classic left-hand-to-right-hand maneuver to prop the price.

Markets loved it: TVL, USDe supply and sUSDe APY all gapped higher. But remember—sUSDe is a liability; only ENA sales are profit. By shrinking float and engineering secondary-market demand, communication costs stay low—especially when the counterparties are seed-lead Dragonfly and market-maker Wintermute. This is less a capital raise than clever accounting.

In short, Ethena has executed a capital-markets escape from the dual-token maze—the biggest innovation since Luna-UST, without the death spiral.

The Adoption Mirage
When the sugar rush fades, only fundamentals remain. ENA’s latest leg up is itself a source of protocol revenue; USDe supply follows in tandem. At least on paper, USDe has a shot at becoming a utility stablecoin.

The playbook—borrowed from BNB/SOL/HYPE—is to inflate yields to bootstrap supply, harvest volatility, and rely on negotiated high-float control to blunt sell-pressure. But capital games only buy time. Long-term, USDe must find real-world use cases to offset market-making costs.

Ethena has always walked on-chain and off-chain simultaneously:

• On-chain: Pendle for rate markets, Hyperliquid as perpetual-DEX partner, and the in-house Ethreal perp as a fallback.

• Off-chain: Securitize (BlackRock’s partner) for the Converge EVM chain targeting institutions; post-Genius-Act, Anchorage Digital is ramping compliant USDtb.

Anchorage and Galaxy Digital are the third wave of dominant market makers—after Jump/Alameda and DWF/Wintermute—yet for all this choreography, real-world adoption remains thin. Compared with USDT/USDC, USDe/USDtb barely touches cross-border payments, tokenized funds, or CEX/DEX pricing. The TON partnership is the lone highlight; most DeFi integrations never escape the echo chamber.

If Ethena’s endgame is on-chain DeFi, victory is already declared. If the goal is off-chain institutional or retail penetration, the journey has barely begun.

Fee Switch: The Sword of Damocles
A new worry has appeared: the fee switch. Recall that today only USDe holders share in protocol revenue. Turning on the switch would let ENA holders stake sENA for yield, turning ENA itself from equity into a liability—another mouth to feed.

Ethena placates CEXs with ENA, stabilizes whales with treasury theatrics, but the reckoning is inevitable. Only when USDe becomes a true USDT/USDC analogue will ENA enter a sustainable flywheel. Until then, Ethena is still juggling chainsaws; the pressure never disappears.

Epilogue: Capital Stimulus vs. Real Adoption
Ethena’s capital wizardry is a defibrillator for every yield-bearing stablecoin (YBS) project—even Genius-Act-compliant payments coins may soon tokenize RWAs for yield. Resolv has already announced its own fee-switch, but with no actual revenue to share. Uniswap has delayed its switch for years, forever balancing LP rewards against UNI holders. Most YBS issuers still lack durable cash flow.

Capital games are a pacemaker; real adoption is the blood.

Foreword: 8 % on DAI, 12 % on sUSDe
In August 2023 Spark, MakerDAO’s lending arm, briefly offered an 8 % APY on DAI. Justin Sun swept in with 230 k stETH—at one point 15 % of Spark’s deposits—forcing an emergency vote that cut the rate to 5 %. What was meant to be a subsidy for DAI usage almost became Sun’s personal yield farm.

Two years later, in July 2025, Ethena is running a “coin-stock-bond” treasury strategy that has pushed sUSDe’s headline yield to ~12 % and sent ENA up 20 % in a day. Born in the Bitcoin treasury-meta, Ethena’s playbook has leap-frogged tickers like SBET and BMNR and finally landed on USDe. Once again, the protocol has weaponized capital markets to spin a two-sided flywheel for both ENA and USDe.

The Dual-Token Deathmatch
USDT invented stablecoins; USDC captured the compliance mindshare; USDe is the capital trap. When ENA’s treasury strategy went live, my instinct was “another copy-paste of the Strategy meta.” A closer look suggests Ethena is actually trying to break the curse that haunts every dual-token stablecoin:

You must choose: either pump the governance token’s price or grow the stablecoin’s market share—you can’t have both.

• Aave pumped AAVE +83 % in three months, yet GHO only prints $300 M.

• MakerDAO’s rebrand to Sky lifted SKY +43 %, while USDS sits at $7.5 B.

• ENA is +94 %, and USDe already matches USDS at $7.6 B.

Add the Luna-UST meltdown and the pattern is clear: limited protocol revenue forces a zero-sum choice between token price and stablecoin supply. USDT, as the first mover, never had to choose; Circle shares profits with partners but never with USDC holders.

Ethena sidesteps this by bribing centralized exchanges with ENA call-options on future profits. For now, big holders, investors and CEXs have been placated, while USDe holders keep the dividend priority. According to A1 Research, Ethena has already returned ~$400 M to USDe holders via sUSDe, vaulting over the moat dug by USDT/USDC.

StablecoinX: A Treasury Unlike the Others
Treasury plays to date fall into four molds:

1. BTC treasury (e.g., Strategy) – Long BTC; 600 k BTC is rocket fuel on the way up, an anchor on the way down.

2. ETH treasury (e.g., BMNR) – Attempt to corner 5 % of supply, emulate Sun-style equity games.

3. BNB/SOL/HYPE treasuries – Foundations or single entities buy their own token to juice price—the laziest form of reflexivity.

4. StablecoinX – ENA’s twist. On paper, an on-chain entity raises $260 M to buy 8 % of circulating ENA, a classic left-hand-to-right-hand maneuver to prop the price.

Markets loved it: TVL, USDe supply and sUSDe APY all gapped higher. But remember—sUSDe is a liability; only ENA sales are profit. By shrinking float and engineering secondary-market demand, communication costs stay low—especially when the counterparties are seed-lead Dragonfly and market-maker Wintermute. This is less a capital raise than clever accounting.

In short, Ethena has executed a capital-markets escape from the dual-token maze—the biggest innovation since Luna-UST, without the death spiral.

The Adoption Mirage
When the sugar rush fades, only fundamentals remain. ENA’s latest leg up is itself a source of protocol revenue; USDe supply follows in tandem. At least on paper, USDe has a shot at becoming a utility stablecoin.

The playbook—borrowed from BNB/SOL/HYPE—is to inflate yields to bootstrap supply, harvest volatility, and rely on negotiated high-float control to blunt sell-pressure. But capital games only buy time. Long-term, USDe must find real-world use cases to offset market-making costs.

Ethena has always walked on-chain and off-chain simultaneously:

• On-chain: Pendle for rate markets, Hyperliquid as perpetual-DEX partner, and the in-house Ethreal perp as a fallback.

• Off-chain: Securitize (BlackRock’s partner) for the Converge EVM chain targeting institutions; post-Genius-Act, Anchorage Digital is ramping compliant USDtb.

Anchorage and Galaxy Digital are the third wave of dominant market makers—after Jump/Alameda and DWF/Wintermute—yet for all this choreography, real-world adoption remains thin. Compared with USDT/USDC, USDe/USDtb barely touches cross-border payments, tokenized funds, or CEX/DEX pricing. The TON partnership is the lone highlight; most DeFi integrations never escape the echo chamber.

If Ethena’s endgame is on-chain DeFi, victory is already declared. If the goal is off-chain institutional or retail penetration, the journey has barely begun.

Fee Switch: The Sword of Damocles
A new worry has appeared: the fee switch. Recall that today only USDe holders share in protocol revenue. Turning on the switch would let ENA holders stake sENA for yield, turning ENA itself from equity into a liability—another mouth to feed.

Ethena placates CEXs with ENA, stabilizes whales with treasury theatrics, but the reckoning is inevitable. Only when USDe becomes a true USDT/USDC analogue will ENA enter a sustainable flywheel. Until then, Ethena is still juggling chainsaws; the pressure never disappears.

Epilogue: Capital Stimulus vs. Real Adoption
Ethena’s capital wizardry is a defibrillator for every yield-bearing stablecoin (YBS) project—even Genius-Act-compliant payments coins may soon tokenize RWAs for yield. Resolv has already announced its own fee-switch, but with no actual revenue to share. Uniswap has delayed its switch for years, forever balancing LP rewards against UNI holders. Most YBS issuers still lack durable cash flow.

Capital games are a pacemaker; real adoption is the blood.