In a cycle obsessed with memecoins and dog tokens, Ethena Labs founder and CEO Guy Young has built one of the largest and most systemic pieces of crypto plumbing.
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In just two years, Young grew Ethena from an idea – admittedly inspired by BitMEX co-founder and crypto guru Arthur Hayes – to a $15 billion protocol by expanding aggressively, removing distribution partnerships between exchanges and on-chain venues, pushing its synthetic dollar USDe and its yield-bearing sUSDe into every corner of the market. The result has been a new category of digital tokens, or yields, that sit at the intersection of the DeFi rails and TradFi core exchanges.
Nick Van Eck, founder of stablecoin protocol AUSD, recently claimed that Ethena has effectively ushered in a new era of crypto-native asset management, with yield being the primary product. Ethena brought fully on-chain yield, opening up a popular hedge fund trade – the ETH/BTC base trade – to anyone with a wallet, wrapped in a simple $1 denominated instrument. If Van Eck is right, this could be a $500 billion to $1 trillion business over the next decade-plus.
Then, Young took Ethena even further, entering the burgeoning stablecoin issuance business and taking a lead against giants like Stripe and Circle. Ethena is helping crypto projects like Solana-based MegaETH, Sui, and Jupiter create their own digital dollar tokens on top of Ethena’s infrastructure, as stablecoins continue to emerge as one of the biggest use cases for blockchains.
