浅析Ethena Labs：估值3亿美元，Arthur Hayes眼中的稳定币颠覆者

Original - Odaily

Author - Azuma

February 16,Stablecoin project Ethena Labs announced the completion of a US$14 million strategic round of financing for US$300 million., Dragonfly, Brevan Howard Digital and Maelstrom, the family office of BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes, jointly led the investment.

In July last year, Ethena Labs also completed a US$6.5 million seed round of financing, led by Dragonfly, with participation from Deribit, Bybit, OKX, Gemini, Huobi, Arthur Hayes and its family office.

Inspiration: Arthur Hayes

Ethena Labs current main product is the Delta Neutral stablecoin USDe, which was inspired by Arthur Hayes, the founder of BitMEX.

In March 2023, Arthur wrote an article titled Dust on Crust》 article, the article talked about his idea for a new generation of stable currency Nakamoto Dollar, that is, to create a stable currency supported by equal amounts of BTC spot longs and futures shorts.

Ethena Labs subsequently turned Arthurs idea into reality, but chose ETH as the main asset for opening spot and futures positions. in other words,The collateral assets of USDe are composed of equal amounts of long spot ETH and short futures ETH.

Or because Ethena Labs is replacing Arthur to promote its vision. The project received strong support from Arthur in the first two rounds of financing. Arthur himself also minted a large amount of USDe himself and even publicly announced on the X platform: USDe will surpass USDT to become the largest U.S. dollar stablecoin.”

What is Delta Neutral?

USDes largest label is Delta Neutral.

The so-called Delta, in finance, is an indicator used to measure the impact of changes in underlying asset prices on changes in investment portfolios. The value range is -1 to 1. The definition of Delta Neutral is that if a portfolio consists of related financial products and its value is not affected by small price changes in the underlying assets, such a portfolio is Delta Neutral.

Considering the nature of USDe’s products,Since the collateral assets of this stablecoin are composed of equal amounts of long spot ETH and short futures ETH, the Delta value of the spot position is 1, and the Delta value of the futures short exposure is -1. The Delta value after hedging the two A value of 0 is delta neutral.

The basic nature of Delta Neutral determines that USDes collateralized casting position is basically unaffected by small price changes in ETH, thus (under normal circumstances) ensuring that USDe can always maintain a healthy collateralization status.

Profit rate is king

The previous article introduced the collateral structure of USDe, so why does Ethena Labs adopt such a complex design? How can USDe seize market share from established stablecoins such as USDT and USDC that have been operating stably for a long time?

The answer lies in the yield. USDe staking users can share the double income from the mortgage assets.

• The first is the stable income from spot long pledge.Ethena Labs supports staking spot ETH through liquidity staking derivative protocols such as Lido, thereby earning an annualized return of 3% - 5%.

• The second is the unstable income from the futures short funding rate. Users who are familiar with contracts understand the concept of funding rates.Although the funding rate is an unstable factor, for short positions, in the long run, the funding rate is positive most of the time, which also means that overall returns will be positive.

The superposition of the two returns has achieved a considerable rate of return for USDe. Official data shows that the Ethena Labs protocol yield and the yield of sUSDe (USDe pledged certificate token) have performed quite amazingly in the past two months.The protocol yield reached a maximum of 58.9% and a minimum of 10.99%; sUSDe reached a maximum of 87.55% and a minimum of 17.43%.

Currently, the real-time rate of return of sUSDe is 27.6%. Thinking about the crazy scene when MakerDAO used RWA to achieve an 8% yield, it is not difficult to understand why Arthur is so confident in USDe.

Four layers of potential risks

Last October, Austin Campbell, professor at Columbia Business School and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting, published an article dismantling the design structure of USDe.

Austin pointed out in the article that he prefers to call USDe a structural note rather than a stable currency, and analyzed USDes four layers of potential risks:

• First, security risks at the pledge level, whether the security and sustainability of the pledge node can be guaranteed;

• Second, the security risks of futures contract opening platforms, both DEX and CEX are subject to hacker attack risks;

• Third, contract availability risk, sometimes there may simply not be enough liquidity to conduct short selling;

• Fourth, funding rate risk, although the funding rate for short positions is positive most of the time, there is also the possibility of turning negative. If the comprehensive rate of return after weighted staking returns is negative, it is quite fatal for stablecoins.

Current data and future prospects

Currently, the total real-time minting amount of USDe is $234 million, which has been growing strongly over the past few months.

It is worth mentioning that Ethena Labs has not yet publicly released its products, and USDe’s product access is still by private invitation only, so it is even more rare to achieve this data performance.

Looking ahead, in addition to the $14 million in funding it just closed, there are several other key things to focus on surrounding Ethena Labs.

One is naturally the public release of products and the disclosure of related token economic models.

Second, Seraphim, Lido’s previous external “face” and head of expansion, has moved to Ethena Labs as head of growth, which may help promote Ethena Labs’ product integration.

Third, Binance Labs has included Ethena Labs in the first batch of incubation projects in Incubation Season 6, which may also be a major boost to Ethena Labs’ accelerated growth.

Challengers on the stablecoin track have come and gone. I hope that this time, Ethena Labs and USDe will bring a different story.