Quick Take
1. Ethena Foundation opened a governance vote to route 95% of net protocol revenue into ENA buybacks once USDe supply reaches tiered milestones, alongside ending future monthly investor unlocks.
2. The first milestone sits at $7.5 billion of USDe supply, while current supply is below $5 billion, down from a peak near $15 billion in October, meaning the mechanism needs roughly 50% supply growth before it activates.
3. ENA trades at $0.1677, up 10.4% and leading the trending list on a day when 87 of 100 tracked assets fell.
Ethena Foundation announced four changes to ENA’s economics on August 27, and the market responded immediately. The token rose 10.4% to $0.1677 while most of the market declined, making it the strongest large mover on the board.
Live price data via CoinGecko. The proposal is substantial and addresses the two criticisms that have followed this token since launch. It also contains a condition that most coverage has not connected to the current data.
What did Ethena actually propose?
Four changes, of which two are structural and two are conditional.
The structural ones take effect regardless of market conditions. Ethena Foundation will buy locked ENA from certain seed investors, and it will end future monthly investor unlocks. That removes the recurring supply overhang that has capped ENA rallies since 2024, which is the more immediately valuable of the two announcements.
The conditional ones depend on growth. A governance vote, which anyone can read in full on Ethena’s governance forum, would activate a fee switch allocating between 5% and over 15% of gross revenue to the Ethena Foundation as USDe hits issuance milestones ranging from $7.5 billion to over $15 billion. Of the funds collected, 95% would go to secondary-market ENA buybacks and 5% to growth. A separate agreement would place most of the intellectual property and economic benefit tied to the protocol with the foundation and ecosystem rather than with shareholders in Ethena Labs.
Why does the milestone matter more than the 95%?
Because 95% of nothing is nothing, and the trigger has not been reached.
USDe supply has fallen below $5 billion, down from a peak near $15 billion in October and $11.7 billion in August 2025. Stablecoin supply by issuer is tracked publicly on DefiLlama. The first fee-switch milestone starts at $7.5 billion. That requires supply to grow by roughly 50% before the mechanism produces a single buyback.
The 95% figure is doing enormous work in the headlines, and it is real. But it is the share of a pool that only opens above a threshold the protocol is currently well below. This site has made the same point about other buyback mechanisms: an authorization is a ceiling, not a schedule, and what matters is the pace of actual execution.
A fee switch is a governance decision to redirect a share of protocol revenue toward token holders, usually through buybacks or distributions, rather than leaving it entirely with users or the operating company.
Can USDe supply grow back to $7.5 billion?
It has been higher before, which is the strongest argument for it, and the reason it fell is the reason to be cautious.
USDe is a synthetic dollar backed by a delta-neutral position: Ethena holds spot crypto assets while shorting equivalent perpetual futures, capturing the funding rate paid by leveraged longs. That funding rate is the revenue, and it scales with bullish leverage; current funding across major venues is visible at CoinGlass.
The contraction from $15 billion to under $5 billion followed weaker conditions in crypto derivatives markets. When funding compresses, the yield on staked USDe falls, and deposits leave for better returns elsewhere. Supply growth therefore depends on sustained bullish positioning across derivatives, which is exactly the condition that has been absent.
This site flagged that dependency on August 21, when ENA traded at $0.1323 and we calculated the token at roughly 1.1 times annualized revenue. The point then was that the multiple looked impossibly cheap because the market was pricing revenue it expected to be cyclical. The supply contraction since is that cyclicality made visible.
What is ENA’s revenue multiple now?
Roughly 1.2 times, still among the lowest readings this site has measured on any token with real revenue.
Ethena recorded $4,034,157 in fees over 24 hours, all of it registering as protocol revenue, which annualizes to about $1.47 billion. Protocol fee and revenue tables update daily on DefiLlama. Against a market capitalization near $1.8 billion at the current price, that puts ENA at approximately 1.2 times annualized revenue.
For comparison from our own running record: Hyperliquid trades near 41 times, having been at 24 times three weeks ago. Most top-100 tokens have no revenue to divide by at all.
The boundary on this figure is the same one we stated a week ago and it has not changed. A single day’s revenue annualized during favorable conditions is not a stable base. It is a snapshot of what the model earns when funding is positive, and the USDe contraction demonstrates what happens when it is not.
What are the risks to this plan?
Emissions, timing, and the possibility that the buybacks are too small to matter even when they start.
Independent analysis has estimated that ENA still faces over $300 million in scheduled emissions during 2026 at current prices, and modelled an annualized buyback in the region of $26 million under one scenario. On those numbers, buybacks would represent roughly 0.1% of daily trading volume, well short of the 1% to 2% generally considered necessary to move a market.
Ending future monthly investor unlocks changes part of that arithmetic, which is why it may prove the more important of yesterday’s announcements. But the emissions already scheduled do not disappear because the future ones stop.
There is also a structural tension the proposal cannot fully resolve. Revenue redirected to ENA buybacks is revenue not paid to staked USDe holders, and sUSDe yield is what attracts the deposits that grow supply toward the milestone. Pulling harder on one lever weakens the other.
Bottom line
Ethena has proposed routing 95% of net protocol revenue into ENA buybacks, but the first milestone requires USDe supply to reach $7.5 billion against a current level below $5 billion, meaning roughly 50% growth is needed before any buyback occurs.
Ending investor unlocks is real and immediate. The buyback is real and conditional. The market has priced both as though they were the same thing, and the difference between them is a 50% expansion in a supply base that has contracted by two thirds since October. Watch USDe supply, not the 95% headline; it is the number that decides whether any of this reaches the token.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Crypto assets are extremely volatile and you can lose your entire stake. Always do your own research.
