Ethena’s ENA Spikes on 2025 Roadmap Release

Ethena’s ENA token is on a tear as traders speculate the project’s 2024 roadmap is set to boost adoption.

Ethena’s ENA spiked by 34% to $1.23, the highest since its April all-time high of $1.46, according to Coingecko.

Driving the rally is the Jan. 3 release of its latest roadmap, which details plans for a new dollar savings product, iUSDe, that will connect traditional finance (TradFi) with decentralized finance (DeFi) and centralized finance (CeFi).

The new product is a wrapped version of its Ethena staked USDe (sUSDe) designed with the needs of TradFi in mind. The sUSDe stablecoin currently offers a 10% yield.

The USDe stablecoin has shot to No. 3 by market capitalization, behind Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. With a market cap of $5.85 billion, it is up from about $100 million since the beginning of 2024 and from $2.5 billion since October.

USDe and sUSDe use a synthetic dollar protocol to maintain their one-to-one peg to the U.S. dollar. When you mint a USDe, it buys ether and simultaneously takes out a short position on it, effectively delta-hedging it against price fluctuations. As for sUSDe, it earns its yield by holding staked ETH, as well as earnings from those short positions.

Targeting TradFi

In the roadmap, Ethena Labs founder Guy Young announced the release of iUSDe will come in February, saying it is “identical to sUSDe with the addition of a simple wrapper contract that adds a handful of transfer restrictions at the token level so that it can be held and used by traditional financial entities.”

Which they in turn can make available to their clients in the $190 trillion fixed income market, the largest liquid investment class in the world, Young noted.

The targets of iUSDe are asset managers, private credit funds, exchange-traded products (ETPs), private investment trusts and prime brokers.

Initial TradFi distribution partners will be announced later this month, Young said. Working with those partners will be Ethena’s “singular focus for Q1 2025,” he added.

Telegram integration

Young also revealed plans to integrate sUSDe into the Telegram messaging app, with 900 million users.

Targeting the payments market, Young said Ethena made the decision to focus on Telegram to avoid competing head-to-head with payments providers on their own turf.

By building a wallet app on Telegram, Ethena aims to provide a mobile neobank-like experience in which users can send, spend and save.

Young said Ethena plans “to provide a billion people a payments and savings product which is as easy to access as sending your friend a message.”

Calling a dollar with yield “the most important savings asset on earth to preserve wealth,” he added, “payments will be connected directly to Apple Pay where you can move between a savings asset in sUSDe to direct mobile tap payments from your phone.”