A new product offering for traditional finance firms, an integration with Telegram, and building an operational network with applications are key elements of Ethena’s plans for 2025.
Posted January 3, 2025 at 2:37 pm EST.
Ethena, a fast-growing crypto project with a “synthetic dollar” token positioned as an alternative to leading stablecoins like Tether’s USDT, saw its token jump Friday in digital-asset markets after founder Guy Young detailed plans for a new offering geared toward traditional financial institutions.
There’s also a planned integration with the messaging platform Telegram and the expected buildout of a dedicated Ethena network.
After Young shared a long-form blog post detailing the protocol’s 2025 roadmap, the governance token ENA’s price jumped 16% to $1.23, giving the cryptocurrency a market cap of $3.6 billion, according to CoinGecko.
The roadmap calls for Ethena’s entrance into the traditional financial industry with a new product offering called iUSDe, slated to roll out next month. The new product would be a variation on Ethena’s staked stablecoin sUSDe, except that iUSDe will include a wrapper contract that enforces transfer restrictions at the token level. The extra mechanism would purportedly allow traditional finance entities to use iUSDe.
“In this context Ethena will perform the role of an interest rate arbitrage vehicle which forces the convergence between capital flows and interest rate markets across DeFi, CeFi and TradFi,” wrote Young. DeFi is the industry shorthand for decentralized finance, CeFi stands for centralized crypto finance and TradFi represents traditional finance.
Read More: DeFi Tokens Jump on Hopes That Trump Will Provide Crypto Regulatory Clarity
Plans for 2025 include integrating sUSDe within popular messaging platform Telegram, which has over 900 million users internationally. According to Young, having sUSDe within Telegram could effectively serve as a mobile neobank for users to transfer, spend, and save. Through Apple Pay, Telegram users could move from sUSDe to direct mobile tap payments on their phones. Neobanks provide online banking services without physical branches.
Ethena’s expectations for the new year also include evolving from a protocol that issues a single asset – namely, its flagship stablecoin – to an operational network.
The network mimics a similar token model to Binance’s BNB token in which ecosystem applications set aside portions of their token supply to be airdropped to those who have staked their ENA tokens.
Young pointed out two applications already building on the Ethena network. The first is Ethereal a decentralized trading platform that runs its orderbook with sUSDe and relies on Ethena for liquidity. The second is Derive, an onchain options protocol building financial derivatives where sUSDe is the core collateral asset for the system. Ethereal is expected to launch its testnet next month and Derive is set to roll out its token in the next two weeks, per Young.
Ethena’s USDe stablecoin has garnered a market cap of more than $5.8 billion, enough to rank it as the third largest stablecoin after Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT.
Wallet addresses identified as belonging to BlockTower Capital, Delphi Venture, CMT Digital, and Galaxy Digital are among the top holders of ENA, data from blockchain analytics firm Nansen shows.