coindesk.com
Ethena’s synthetic stablecoin, $USDe, has crossed $8.4 billion in supply, adding more than $3.14 billion over 20 days in a surge that outpaced flows into BlackRock’s (BLK) flagship bitcoin and ether exchange-traded funds.
According to on-chain data curated by the Ethena community, the supply increase since July 17 is the fastest period of growth since the protocol's inception in February 2024.
Inflow into the yield-bearing stablecoin exceeds the $2.75 billion added to BlackRock’s ether ETF (ETHA) and the $1.60 billion into its bitcoin ETF (IBIT) in the same period, making the DeFi-native stablecoin the biggest magnet for capital across both on- and off-chain markets in recent weeks.
The rally has spilled over into Ethena’s governance token $ENA, which more than doubled in the past month, though it is down 12% in the past 24 hours as traders hope the long-awaited fee switch will soon activate.
The protocol has already surpassed most of the thresholds required to distribute revenue to staked $ENA holders, with the final benchmark, a favorable yield spread versus rivals, expected to be met soon.
$USDe's reflexive loop
$USDe’s recent growth reflects a powerful reflexive loop built into its core design, as Nansen explained in a recent research report on the Ethena ecosystem.
As bitcoin and ether prices rally, perpetual funding rates in turn increasingly positive. Ethena captures this funding via delta-neutral hedges, and distributes it as real-time yield to sUSDe holders.
That higher yield then draws in more users, leading to greater $USDe issuance, more hedging, and more protocol revenue.
In the last month, Ethena has brought in nearly $50 million in feed and $10 million in revenue, according to DeFiLlama data. This makes it the sixth best-performing protocol for monthly fee revenue according to the data aggregator.
$ENA is currently trading for $0.58.