Ethena's USDe Stablecoin Surges Past $4 Billion in Supply as ENA Token Jumps on Buyback Plan

Ethena's synthetic dollar USDe is having a moment. On Coinbase's Base network, USDe supply went from roughly $1.3 million to $337 million in 90 days, a 25,645% jump, according to Crypto Briefing. That makes it the second-largest stablecoin on Base, trailing only USDC's roughly $4.25 billion presence on the same chain, per the same report.

USDe supply on Robinhood Chain has surpassed $320 million just eight weeks after launch, representing 42% of that chain's total stablecoin supply, according to Bloomingbit, citing Token Terminal data. Wu Blockchain reported this on August 28. Analyst Mesh, cited in that report, credited the growth to Stakehouse Financial choosing Ethena as a key collateral provider for Robinhood Earn, with most of the liquidity flowing into a Morpho lending market that effectively steers borrowers toward depositing USDe.

Globally, USDe's total supply sits around $4 billion to $4.08 billion across 21 chains, according to Crypto Briefing and KuCoin. Supply had cratered from a peak near $15 billion last October, per KuCoin, which cited DefiLlama's public stablecoin-by-issuer tracking.

How USDe Actually Works

USDe isn't backed by dollars sitting in a bank account like USDC or USDT. It's a synthetic dollar. Ethena holds spot crypto, mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum, and opens equal short positions in perpetual futures to stay roughly dollar-neutral no matter which way crypto prices move, according to Crypto Briefing. The yield comes from funding rates that leveraged traders pay to hold their positions, which Ethena passes to holders through a staked version of the token called sUSDe.

That funding-rate yield has gotten less attractive over time. Bitcoin funding averaged 11% annualized in 2024, fell to 4.9% in 2025, and averaged just 2.2% year-to-date through August 11, according to Ethena's own data as reported by Coinpedia. Ethena is now trying to solve this by expanding into a new market: equities.

The Equity Perp Pivot

Equity perpetual futures, contracts that let traders bet on stocks like Tesla or Nvidia with leverage, first showed up on Hyperliquid in December 2025 with about $90 million in open interest, Coinpedia reported. Binance followed with a Tesla contract in January 2026. By August 11, aggregate open interest across venues had hit $6.2 billion, a tenfold jump since March, with memory and AI hardware contracts making up roughly half of that action.

The appeal for Ethena is straightforward. From May 20 to August 11, Hyperliquid's open-interest-weighted equity funding rate averaged 14% to 17.5%, far outpacing Bitcoin's 4.1% over the same stretch, according to Coinpedia. If Ethena can run the same basis trade on stocks that it runs on crypto, it gets a bigger, better-paying pool to draw yield from.

That pivot is happening alongside a retreat elsewhere. Bankless reported on August 28 that HyENA, a USDe-margined exchange Ethena backed on Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework, is shutting down, with all its markets closing by September 2, as Hyperliquid moves closer to USDC. Ethena is trading one venue for a bigger one.

ENA's Buyback Promise Has a Catch

The ENA token, Ethena's separate governance and value-capture asset, jumped 10.4% to $0.1677 on August 27, making it the day's strongest large mover while 87 of 100 tracked assets fell, according to KuCoin, which cited CoinGecko price data. The jump followed the Ethena Foundation's announcement of four changes to ENA's economics.

Two of those changes are unconditional: the Foundation is buying out locked ENA from certain seed investors and ending future monthly investor unlocks, according to both Bankless and KuCoin. Both outlets describe this as removing a recurring supply overhang that has weighed on ENA since 2024.

The other two are conditional. Ethena has proposed a fee switch that would route 95% of qualifying net protocol revenue into ENA buybacks, but only once USDe supply hits tiered milestones starting at $7.5 billion, KuCoin reported. Current global USDe supply sits at roughly $4 billion. Supply needs to grow by roughly 84%, nearly doubling from here, before a single buyback happens under this mechanism.

KuCoin's own analysis put it plainly: "95% of nothing is nothing, and the trigger has not been reached." The outlet argued that most coverage of the announcement failed to connect the headline buyback percentage to the fact that the fee switch remains dormant until supply nearly doubles from its current level.

USDe supply has already climbed from below $4 billion to above $4 billion over the past month, according to Bankless, and ENA is up over 100% in the past 30 days. If Base and Robinhood Chain growth continues at anything close to its recent pace, and if the equity perp market keeps expanding the way it has since March, the $7.5 billion threshold isn't unrealistic.

But growth of that scale isn't guaranteed, and Ethena's own history shows supply can fall as fast as it rises. Whether USDe adds another $3.4 billion in the coming months, or whether investors are cheering a buyback plan that stays theoretical, depends on data nobody has yet. ENA also faces a 40.63 million token unlock scheduled for September 2, according to Bitcoin Foundation, citing CoinGecko, which adds fresh supply right as the buyback conversation heats up.