Ethena has opened an on-chain governance vote to activate its long-anticipated fee switch, directly linking ENA token buybacks to the expansion of its synthetic dollar, USDe. According to the proposal, the protocol would allocate between 5% and more than 15% of gross revenue to the Ethena Foundation once USDe issuance crosses milestones from $7.5 billion to over $15 billion. Of those collected funds, 95% would be reserved exclusively for secondary market buybacks of ENA.
The measure is designed to align value capture with token holders without reducing sUSDe yields, while addressing selling pressure from early investors after the transfer of Ethena Labs' intellectual property to the Foundation.
In a separate but related announcement, the Ethena Foundation said it had executed a buyout of all locked tokens from certain major seed investors that had sold any portion of their positions. The foundation wants no investor tokens subject to lockups by October 5, ending the recurring overhang from monthly venture capital unlocks by releasing unvested tokens. Team locks remain tied to their original vesting schedules.
The overhaul includes an agreement assigning the IP and value accrued by the protocol exclusively to the Foundation, plus the proposal to route 95% of net revenue into ENA buybacks. Ethena operates a synthetic-dollar protocol on Ethereum: USDe holds its dollar peg by pairing crypto collateral with short futures positions, unlike cash-backed stablecoins such as USDT and USDC. The project has raised $166 million from backers including Franklin Templeton, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital and Binance Labs.
ENA was trading around $0.166, up more than 20% in 24 hours, with a market cap above $1.62 billion. A week earlier it changed hands near $0.085, though it remains far below its April 2024 all-time high of $1.52. The announcements came shortly after a Hack VC-linked wallet reportedly sold $3 million of ENA into Wintermute during a 58% rally. They also cap a year of institutional activity: in June Coinbase Ventures bought ENA on the open market and partnered with Ethena on onchain savings products aimed at more than 100 million users, and in August FalconX and Ethena opened a $1 billion secured lending facility that channels USDe reserves into overcollateralized institutional loans.
