A new product offering for traditional financial companies, integration with Telegram and the creation of an operational network with applications are key elements of Ethena’s plans for 2025.
Top ENA holders include wallet addresses identified as belonging to BlockTower Capital, Delphi Venture, CMT Digital, and Galaxy Digital.
(Shutterstock)
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 major stablecoins like Tether’s USDT, saw its token surge Friday in digital asset markets after its founder Guy Young detailed plans for a new offering aimed at traditional financial services. establishments.
There are also plans for integration with the Telegram messaging platform and the expected creation of a dedicated Ethena network.
After Young shared a detailed blog post detailing the protocol’s roadmap for 2025, the price of the ENA governance token jumped 16% to $1.23, giving the cryptocurrency a market cap of 3, $6 billion, according to CoinGecko.
The roadmap envisions Ethena entering the traditional financial sector with a new product offering called iUSDe, scheduled to launch next month. The new product would be a variation of Ethena’s staked sUSDe stablecoin, except that iUSDe will include a wrapper contract that enforces transfer restrictions at the token level. The additional mechanism would allegedly allow traditional financial entities to use iUSDe.
“In this context, Ethena will play the role of an interest rate arbitrage vehicle that will force convergence between capital flows and interest rate markets across DeFi, CeFi and TradFi,” Young wrote . DeFi is the industry shorthand for decentralized finance, CeFi stands for centralized crypto-finance, and TradFi stands for traditional finance.
Read more: DeFi Tokens Jump on Hopes Trump Will Bring Crypto Regulatory Clarity
Plans for 2025 include integrating sUSDe into the popular messaging platform Telegram, which has more than 900 million users worldwide. According to Young, having sUSDe in Telegram could effectively serve as a mobile neobank allowing users to transfer, spend and save. With Apple Pay, Telegram users could move from sUSDe to direct mobile payments on their phone. Neobanks offer online banking services without physical branches.
Ethena’s expectations for the new year also include evolving a protocol that issues a single asset – namely its flagship stablecoin – into a functioning network.
The network mimics a token model similar to Binance’s BNB token in which apps in the ecosystem set aside a portion of their token supply to airdrop to those who have staked their ENA tokens.
Young highlighted two applications that already rely on the Ethena network. The first is Ethereal, a decentralized trading platform that manages its order book with sUSDe and relies on Ethena for liquidity. The second is Derive, an on-chain options protocol creating financial derivatives where sUSDe is the primary collateral asset of the system. Ethereal is expected to launch its testnet next month and Derive is expected to deploy its token within the next two weeks, according to Young.
Ethena’s stablecoin USDe has generated a market capitalization of over $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 largest holders of ENA, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Nansen.
