The Foundation also wants 95 per cent of net revenue routed into open-market ENA purchases once USDe supply passes $7.5 billion. Supply is currently under $5 billion.
The Ethena Foundation has bought the locked ENA sitting with the seed investors who had spent the past nine months selling it.
Those purchases, disclosed on Thursday, are one part of a three-piece restructuring of the token's economics. The Foundation also said the remaining original investor allocations will unlock in a single release on 5 October rather than dripping out month by month, and it has put a fee switch to a governance vote that would direct 95 per cent of net revenue into open-market ENA purchases. The token traded around $0.17 on Thursday, up roughly a fifth on the day and close to double where it sat a week earlier.
The buyout terms drew a line at the token's October 2025 high. Investors who had sold any ENA after that peak were offered a buyout of their remaining locked allocation, and all but one wallet accepted. Investors who had never sold were offered full price, and not one of them took it. The backers being paid to leave were the ones already leaving; the holders stayed holders.
Ending the monthly calendar is not the same as destroying supply. The tokens the Foundation did not buy still exist, and they now arrive at once rather than in instalments. Roughly 12 per cent of total supply remains locked, all of it held by the team, the ecosystem fund and the Foundation itself, and team vesting schedules were left untouched. StablecoinX, the Nasdaq-listed treasury company trading under the ticker USDE, holds about a fifth of supply under a separate lockup disclosed in its SEC filings. What changed on Thursday was the shape of the release, not its size.
The fee switch is the more consequential proposal, and the one carrying a condition. Under the Snapshot vote, open until 2 September, 95 per cent of the net revenue that Ethena's branded businesses pay the Foundation would fund programmatic ENA purchases once USDe supply reaches $7.5 billion, with the remaining 5 per cent retained for growth. Later supply milestones would raise the allocation further. USDe supply currently sits under $5 billion. On the protocol's own thresholds, the stablecoin has to grow by more than half before the mechanism moves a single dollar.
That gap is the story of the past ten months. USDe peaked near $15 billion in October and has contracted by roughly two thirds since, tracking the collapse in crypto derivatives funding rates that supply most of its yield. USDe is not a reserve-backed stablecoin. It holds collateral against short derivatives positions, so the return it can pay moves with the funding market rather than with Treasury bills, and when funding compresses the reason to hold it compresses too. The wider market has had its own rough year: stablecoin supply recently posted its worst drawdown since the Terra collapse.
Ethena has bought its own token before. In August 2025 it ran a $260 million programme spending about $5 million a day, at a point when USDe supply and protocol revenue were both climbing. That was a fixed pot of capital doing a fixed job. The proposal now on Snapshot is different in kind, tying purchases to recurring revenue and to supply thresholds, which makes it durable if the business grows and inert if it does not.
The search for revenue that does not depend on perpetual funding explains most of Ethena's recent activity. On 19 August it opened a $1 billion warehouse facility with the prime broker FalconX, allowing assets backing USDe to be deployed into overcollateralised institutional loans. Grayscale added ENA to its Decentralized Finance Fund in the first-quarter 2026 rebalance, and Coinbase Ventures bought the token on the open market in June rather than taking a discounted private allocation. Institutional demand for the equity story has arrived faster than demand for the stablecoin itself. Compound has been running a similar experiment, with only $14 million of a $52 million institutional reboot actually available at launch.
The third piece of Thursday's announcement is corporate rather than monetary. Under an agreement in principle described by the Foundation, substantially all material intellectual property and economic upside tied to the Ethena protocol would belong to the Foundation and the ecosystem rather than to equity holders in Ethena Labs. The parties expect to publish it in October. Splitting protocol economics away from the development company is a live question across DeFi governance; ENS holders voted in August to move a $65 million endowment under their foundation for related reasons.
Fee switches work when there is revenue to switch. Uniswap turned its v4 switch on across seven chains last month and it collects around $325,000 a day from live trading volume. Ethena's would collect nothing at all until USDe supply grows by more than half from where it stands today.
