The token trades at $0.64, valuing it at over $10 billion on a totally diluted foundation.
Hours after launching its ENA token, Ethena Labs has change into the fifth-largest stablecoin issuer by market capitalization.
Ethena Labs airdropped 750 million ENA tokens, representing 5% of the entire provide, to early adopters, amassing a market capitalization of $1 billion within the course of. Its USDe artificial U.S. greenback market worth additionally exceeds $1.6 billion.
Tuesday’s long-awaited airdrop comes six weeks after the Ethena Shard occasion, or factors system, started on February 19. The marketing campaign incentivized merchants to publish collateral in change for future distributions of ENA. These customers can money out now.
In keeping with Coingecko, the newly launched ENA token is buying and selling at $0.73 and has a market capitalization of $1 billion. The community has a totally diluted valuation of $11 billion.
ENA is now accessible for buying and selling on Binance, Bybit, Kucoin and lots of different exchanges.
Ethena Labs claims the token is a core element of its governance construction and the start of the protocol’s journey towards decentralization. The 5% allotted right this moment belongs to the 30% allotted to ecosystem growth.
Season 2 begins right this moment
April 2 marks the ENA airdrop and the start of the second section of the Ethena Incentive Program, often known as Season 2, or “The Sats Marketing campaign.” At this stage, the mission will use Bitcoin as collateral for the protocol along with Lido’s stETH.
The staff wrote right this moment that bringing BTC into the Ethena ecosystem will open the door to Bitcoin perpetual futures, unlocking roughly $25 billion in delta-hedged open curiosity. US$25 billion means 2.5 occasions the present measurement of ETH perpetual futures.
Delta hedging is an choices buying and selling technique designed to cut back the directional danger related to value modifications within the underlying asset by taking reverse positions.
The Ethena staff defined that year-to-date Bitcoin funding reached 22% of $25 billion, which ought to imply whole annual money move of roughly $2.75 billion, because of half of open curiosity being paid to brief sellers By.
USDe is Ethena’s artificial stablecoin that backs tokens pegged to $1 by staking Ethereum, whereas additionally hedging stETH by way of brief ETH positions on centralized exchanges. Each stETH and brief positions assist cross on positive aspects to stablecoin holders.
The structure has been praised by many within the crypto neighborhood, whereas additionally inflicting LUNA PTSD on account of its double-digit yields.
The Sats marketing campaign will final for 5 months till September 2, or till the USDe provide reaches $5 billion. The present prize pool is $1.6 billion, and contributors within the first season may also profit from elevated rewards.
New season, new cooperation
The staff additionally introduced quite a few new partnerships, launching right this moment.
Final week, MakerDAO introduced the allocation of $100 million in DAI to the Morpho pool of USDe and sUSDe (collateralized USDe) lending protocols, deploying Spark DAI Morpho Vault. Ethena’s staff writes that customers earn 7x the USDe collateral shards of their USDe collateral and 5x the sUSDe collateral.
The second quarter will carry bigger multipliers to customers who deposit collateral, as much as 20x for USDe and as much as 5x for sUSDe.
Pendle Finance is a DeFi platform that permits customers to tokenize and commerce the longer term earnings of Ethereum belongings and is already a core element of the Ethena liquidity pool. As a part of Season 2, it should reopen the prevailing USDe Pendle pool to customers right this moment, increasing its cap to $100 million.
As well as, Ethena will combine the Ethereum layer 2 scaling answer Mantle Community and supply a brand new Pendle liquid staking pool on Mantle. Integrating these platforms will give customers the choice to earn Sats in addition to Eigenlayer Factors, a platform that permits Ethereum stakers to stake ETH throughout platforms and now provides Ethena to its choices. As a way to earn sat or factors, customers can receive USDe on Mantle or present liquidity to the mining pool.
