Ethena Wants All Of Its Revenue Buying ENA

gm, Defiers!

These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:

• Ethena puts all of its net revenue up for ENA buybacks
• Moonwell loses $8.7 million and halts borrowing on Base
• Bitcoin clears $80,000 as Schwab adds three tokens
• Machi Big Brother bids $1 million for a friend.tech nobody owns

The Ethena Foundation put a vote on Snapshot on Thursday that would send effectively all of the protocol's net revenue into buying ENA.

The same announcement hands protocol intellectual property and accrued value to the Foundation, with Ethena Labs equity investors keeping no residual claim on protocol cash flow. The Foundation also said it bought out the remaining locked ENA held by seed investors who had been selling for nine months, and agreed with lead investors to release unvested venture tokens so the monthly unlocks stop. It named no investors and disclosed no price.

ENA rose 21.9% to $0.1669, its biggest one-day move among the 150 largest tokens after VeChain. Ethena generates $310 million of annualized fees, of which $5.3 million currently reaches the protocol as revenue.

Read more below!

DEFI

Ethena Proposes Sending All Net Revenue to ENA Buybacks

The Ethena Foundation opened a governance vote to direct all net revenue generated across Ethena-branded businesses into programmatic ENA buybacks. The vote went live on Snapshot on Thursday after Risk Committee approval, and the Foundation did not state a closing date. A Master Framework Agreement between Ethena Labs and the Foundation assigns protocol intellectual property and ownership of accrued value exclusively to the Foundation, governed by ENA holders, with Labs equity investors retaining no residual claim on protocol cash flow. Ethena's token-transparency filing describes Labs as a Portuguese company that provides services to the Foundation, holds no ownership interest in it, and cannot appoint or remove its directors.

Ethena Proposes Sending All Net Revenue to ENA BuybacksA new framework assigns protocol IP and value accrual to the Ethena Foundation, while a live vote would use effectively 100% of net revenue for ENA purchases.thedefiant.io

Why this matters: ENA holders get a claim on cash flow they did not previously have, written into a framework agreement between Labs and the Foundation. The revenue reaching the protocol is $5.3 million.

HACKS

Moonwell Loses $8.7 Million To MAMO Price Manipulation

Moonwell lost roughly $8.7 million on Thursday after an attacker manipulated the price of MAMO, a small-cap token it accepts as collateral on Base, and borrowed real assets against the inflated position. The protocol's remedy was to shut itself down: borrow caps for every core market on Base went to 1 wei, stopping new borrowing across the entire deployment, with supply caps for MAMO and WELL set to the same. CertiK and PeckShield both put the loss near $8.7 million. Blockaid observed 50.6 cbBTC worth more than $4 million drained from the mCBTC market, and the proceeds now sit consolidated as 8,728,318 DAI at an Ethereum address funded from Tornado Cash on Aug. 21.

Why this matters: Listing a token with about $1 million of daily volume as collateral is a governance decision. It cost Moonwell more than four times its annualized revenue.

MARKETS

Bitcoin Clears $80,000 As Schwab Adds Solana

Bitcoin traded above $80,000 on Thursday as Charles Schwab told clients it will add Solana, Avalanche and Chainlink to Schwab Crypto, a retail platform that has carried only bitcoin and ether since May. The three named tokens outran the two already listed: SOL gained 12.9%, Chainlink 5.5% and Avalanche 3.6%, against 2.1% for bitcoin and 1.5% for ether. Bitcoin last changed hands at $80,020, up 10.4% over seven days, after a $78,294.85 to $80,793.49 range; it had not settled above Wednesday's $79,018 close in the prior five sessions. Total crypto market value reached $2.79 trillion on $99.4 billion of volume, and 63 of the 71 largest non-stablecoin, non-tokenized-fund tokens rose.

Why this matters: Schwab gave no date and no client or asset figures, and its advisor channel waits until mid-2027. The retail menu goes to five tokens.

DEFI

Machi Big Brother Bids $1 Million For Friend.tech

Jeffrey Huang, the Taiwanese entrepreneur who trades and posts as Machi Big Brother, offered $1 million to buy friend.tech from co-founder Racer and Paradigm, and FRIEND went up 28 times within an hour. There is little left to buy. The dev team transferred ownership of the trading contracts to Ethereum's null address in September 2024, and FriendtechSharesV1's owner() function still returns zeros, so nobody can change the code or redirect its fees. Huang narrowed the target in a reply: "I just need the X account and url." FRIEND traded at $0.0031 before the post, a market capitalization of about $297,000, and closed the 1 a.m. ET quarter-hour at $0.0878. By 10:30 a.m. it was back to $0.0219, with $264,757 of liquidity in its deepest pool on Base.

Why this matters: The bonding-curve reserve backing outstanding keys is worth twice the bid. What Huang would buy is an X handle and a domain, since the contracts belong to nobody.

Other Stories Worth Your Time

Core Lightning Tells Node Operators To Go Offline — CLN's maintainers told operators on Wednesday to run their nodes --offline unless they upgrade to a release that has not been published, with the details of what it fixes under a two-week embargo. Neither the binaries nor an advisory had appeared. It is the fourth Bitcoin infrastructure alarm since late July, after Coldcard, Boltz and BTCPay Server.

39 State Banking Groups Form BankChain Alliance — Thirty-nine state bankers associations formed an industry-owned network for tokenized deposits, stablecoins and automated settlement, targeting 2027. Members represent 3,283 banks with $21.8 trillion in assets, though the associations are the participants and their member banks have not individually joined. No technology partner, committed capital or pricing has been disclosed.

Unstoppable Skips ICANN Round, Refunds Web3 Domains — Unstoppable Domains did not apply for .crypto, .wallet or its other web3 strings in ICANN's 2026 round and is refunding buyers, six months after confirming it would apply. Founder Matthew Gould said compliance and bidding cost more than the company expected to recover in sales. unstoppabledomains.com now redirects to unstoppable.ai.

Aave V4 Deposits Reach $806 Million After 30% Weekly Gain — V4 deposits crossed $800 million on Thursday, up from $500 million on Aug. 19, against $216 million of active loans. EtherFi Cash on Optimism is the second-largest market at $257 million, behind Ethereum Core's $378 million. V3 still holds $31 billion of deposits.

StarkWare Says It Confirmed a Quantum Safe Bitcoin Transaction — A transaction using StarkWare's QSB design was mined in block 964,199 on Aug. 26 without a soft fork, paying a 5,179-satoshi fee. The onchain record shows inclusion, and the quantum-resistance claim comes from StarkWare and the method's author. The spend was nonstandard and needed MARA's Slipstream to reach a miner.

Trending on The Defiant

Cosmos Labs Urges EVM Chains To Halt As Shared Bug Drains Three Networks · BLOCKCHAINS

Coinbase Launches Tokenized Stocks On Base · DEFI

Aave Opens iOS Early Access, Keeps Android and Web Waitlisted · DEFI

Term Finance Permanently Shuts Meta Vaults After Exploit · HACKS

Circle Targets Sept. 16 for Arc Public Mainnet Launch · BLOCKCHAINS