Nine months ago, some of Ethena’s earliest backers started quietly selling ENA. On Thursday, the foundation behind the token did something about it. It bought them out.
The Foundation Bought Its Own Sellers
The Ethena Foundation said in a post that it purchased the remaining locked tokens from certain large seed investors who had been selling ENA over the past nine months, according to CoinDesk’s reporting on the announcement. It will also accelerate what remains of the original investor unlock schedule, ending the monthly VC release for good. Team tokens keep their existing vesting terms, untouched.
No small number, either.
A Buyback Tied To A Number
ENA holders are voting on a fee switch right now. Once USDe’s circulating supply clears $7.5 billion, 95 percent of net revenue from Ethena branded businesses would flow straight into programmatic ENA purchases. The remaining 5 percent funds growth. That vote opened today, per CoinMarketCal’s tracked event calendar for the token, and there’s no result posted yet.
Ethena Labs and the foundation are also formalizing where the protocol’s underlying economics actually sit, which sounds bureaucratic until you read the terms. Under an agreement in principle, substantially all of Ethena’s intellectual property and economic upside would belong to the foundation and the people building around it, not to Ethena Labs’ equity holders. The paperwork is expected in October.
USDe Shrank By Two Thirds
Here’s the part that explains the urgency. USDe’s supply fell from near 15 billion dollars at its October peak to under $5 billion now, as funding-rate yield dried up once markets cooled. DeFiLlama’s own income statement for Ethena shows the damage in plain numbers: gross protocol revenue ran $65.11 million in Q1 2026, dropped to $51.6 million in Q2, and sits at just 32.26 million dollars so far into Q3, a partial quarter.
Real usage, thinning margins.
Total value locked held up regardless, still $4.486 billion by DeFiLlama’s count. Annualized net revenue after costs comes to $5.31 million, a fraction of what the protocol was earning a year ago. That gap between a business that’s still enormous and a token that wasn’t capturing much of it is exactly what today’s buyback mechanism is built to close.
Institutions Showed Up Anyway
Even as USDe shrank, Ethena kept landing institutional deals in the weeks before this. FalconX’s billion-dollar warehouse facility went live August 19, channeling USDe backing assets into overcollateralized loans for institutional borrowers. Coinbase’s venture arm bought ENA around the same stretch, and Coinbase itself shipped a savings product built on Ethena. Janus Henderson invested back in June and has reportedly been exploring USDe distribution since.
Arthur Hayes, who is rarely quiet about this token, called ENA “a 5 to 10x bet” around August 11, right after it had fallen more than 90 percent off its all time high. He wasn’t wrong about the bottom, at least so far.
The Chart Argues Back
ENA spent most of July and August grinding sideways between roughly seven and ten cents, a long base after a six month slide from near $0.15 back in February. The FalconX news alone pushed it up to $0.185 on August 24. It gave more than half of that gain back within two days, sliding to $0.135 by Tuesday. Today’s tokenomics news put it right back near the top of that range: $0.169, up 22.4% on the day, according to CoinGecko.
Open interest on ENA sits at $509 million, per Coinglass, and positioning across venues is close to even. Liquidations split unevenly by exchange. Binance and OKX both burned more short positions than long ones over the past 24 hours; Bybit saw it the other way around. Not a clean squeeze.
Bitcoin moved 2 percent that same day and ether barely a percent, so this one belongs to ENA, not the wider market. Nearly all of the actual trading happens on centralized venues too. Ethena’s own exchange tickers show north of 99 percent of reported volume clearing through Binance, OKX, Bybit and the rest of the usual list; on-chain liquidity barely registers next to it.
Two Dates Still Undecided
The fee switch vote has no result yet. The IP and economic upside agreement isn’t due until October. Buyback money doesn’t start moving until USDe’s circulation climbs back to $7.5 billion, and right now it sits under 5 billion. Every piece of today’s rally is a bet that those three things land the way the foundation just said they would.
ENA is still 89% below its April 2024 high of $1.52. Buyback or not.
