Ethena has put a governance proposal to a vote that would send 95 percent of net revenue from its branded businesses into ENA buybacks once the USDe stablecoin supply reaches .5 billion, alongside a plan to end monthly investor unlocks and move protocol economics out of Ethena Labs equity.
The Ethena Foundation framed the package as a fix for two complaints that have followed the token since launch: a steady drip of unlocked supply from early investors, and uncertainty over whether protocol revenue ever reaches ENA holders at all. ENA rose about 23 percent over 24 hours to around /usr/bin/bash.17 after the announcement, roughly doubling in a little more than a week.
How the buyback switch would work
Under the proposal, ENA holders are voting on a fee switch that ties token purchases to the size of USDe’s circulating supply. Once USDe crosses the first threshold of .5 billion, 95 percent of net revenue from Ethena-branded businesses would fund programmatic ENA purchases on the open market. The remaining 5 percent would stay with the ecosystem. Buybacks would scale up at further supply milestones, so growth in the business translates mechanically into demand for the token.
That is a different structure from the buyback program Ethena ran in August 2025, when a fixed 60 million pool bought roughly million of ENA per day. The new design ties purchases to recurring revenue rather than a pot that runs out, which supporters argue makes the demand more durable and critics note makes it dependent on Ethena staying profitable.
Ending the unlock overhang
The foundation said it has bought the remaining locked tokens of certain large seed investors who had been selling ENA for the past nine months. Remaining original investor allocations will unlock on an accelerated schedule, ending the monthly venture releases entirely. Team tokens keep their existing vesting.
Accelerated unlocks change when supply hits the market, not how much of it exists. But removing the holdings of investors who were actively selling, and putting them with a foundation that has stated goals, shifts the seller base. Token unlocks have moved ENA prices before, though a June 2025 release of about $41 million ENA produced only a 1 percent dip, so the market’s sensitivity is hard to predict.
Institutional ownership has grown through the year. Grayscale added ENA to its Decentralized Finance Fund in its first-quarter 2026 rebalance, and StablecoinX, a Nasdaq-listed vehicle holding about $3.03 billion ENA, began trading in June after a merger with TLGY Acquisition Corp.
Separating token economics from equity
The third piece is a planned agreement, expected to be published in October, under which substantially all intellectual property and economic upside tied to the Ethena protocol would sit with the foundation and the ecosystem rather than with shareholders of Ethena Labs, the development company.
The arrangement addresses a question that has dogged governance tokens across decentralized finance: when a protocol generates revenue, who actually captures it? Formalizing the split could clarify what ENA holders own and what equity investors own, which matters as more traditional institutions take positions in the token.
Coinbase Ventures bought ENA on the open market in June rather than receiving a private allocation, and Coinbase and Ethena announced plans to build onchain finance and savings products together. A first product, a high-yield USDC vault built on Morpho infrastructure, launched the same month with Ethena-related assets in its collateral structure.
The supply problem underneath
None of the token mechanics change the harder fact that USDe itself has shrunk. Supply has fallen below billion from a peak near 5 billion in October, as weaker conditions in crypto derivatives markets cut into the funding-rate strategy that generates Ethena’s returns.
USDe is not a reserve-backed stablecoin. Ethena maintains its dollar exposure through collateral paired with derivatives positions, so its yield moves with funding rates. When those rates compress, the product becomes less attractive and deposits leave. During the previous expansion, USDe had reached $11.7 billion in supply by August 2025 while Ethena reported more than 00 million in cumulative gross interest revenue and weekly revenue of $13.4 million.
Ethena has spent 2026 building revenue sources beyond funding rates. In August it announced a billion warehouse facility with prime broker FalconX, letting assets behind USDe be deployed into overcollateralized institutional loans. In June, asset manager Janus Henderson, which oversees roughly 80 billion, invested in ENA and began exploring USDe for treasury management. BlackRock integrated USDe into its Aladdin platform with plans for a 00 million liquidity facility connected to its tokenized BUIDL fund. Ethena also planned a 50 million allocation to Securitize’s tokenized AAA-rated CLO fund when it expanded to Solana, with BNY Mellon as custodian.
Those deals matter for the buyback proposal in a direct way. If net revenue is what funds the purchases, the proposal’s value depends on how quickly the institutional business grows and whether USDe supply can recover toward the .5 billion trigger, a level it has not held since well before the contraction. At the current size, the fee switch would stay dormant.
Voting is open to ENA holders under the foundation’s governance process. The proposal is non-binding in the sense that execution depends on the supply thresholds being met, and the October agreement will need its own disclosure before anyone can judge how the equity split actually works.
Whether the market treats the package as a structural fix or a well-timed response to a price rally will show up in USDe deposits over the coming weeks. The token can double on a proposal. The supply has to come back the slow way.