ENA Doubles in Ten Days: Subsidies Shut Off, Unlocks Accelerated—How Long Can the Rally Last?

Author: Ma He, Foresight News

On September 25, Ethena officially announced on Twitter that it would connect USDe's basis strategy to Binance's tokenized US stocks and equity perpetuals. The next day, it issued another announcement stating that starting from the end of this month, all token incentives and inflation tied to USDe growth would be completely halted.

Since September 16, the ENA token price has surged from $0.014 all the way to around $0.2, then after brief consolidation at the $0.2 threshold, it rallied to around $0.28, recording a gain of nearly 100% over 10 days.

Behind ENA's price surge — is it positive stimulus or expectation upgrading? Or is it paving the way for the massive token unlock in early October?

Hedging Yield Expanded to Tokenized US Stocks, Growth Subsidies Shut Off

On September 25, Ethena adopted Binance's bStocks tokenized US equities as spot collateral assets and hedged the related exposure through Binance equity perpetual contracts. Ethena's Risk Committee had previously approved the inclusion of tokenized stock basis trades into USDe's allocation strategy. Ethena had previously primarily constructed USDe's Delta-neutral yield strategy by holding crypto spot assets and using derivatives for hedging.

Official website data shows that USDe's current supply is approximately $5.5 billion. Ethena states that Binance equity perpetual contract open interest exceeds $2.9 billion, with a month-over-month compound growth rate of 105% year-to-date, and equity basis annualized yield averaging 3.56% over the past 6 months.

Ethena founder Guy Young claims this is the most significant expansion of USDe's funding source mechanism since its launch. Ethena expects that as more traditional financial assets come on-chain, future opportunities in the equity perpetual contract market may significantly exceed those in the crypto perpetual contract market.

USDe is not the kind of stablecoin backed by cash plus Treasuries. It packages a delta-neutral strategy into a dollar: holding spot while shorting an equivalent amount of perpetuals, capturing the funding rate that longs pay to maintain leverage. Price movements are hedged out on both sides, and yield comes from the funding rate itself.

From 2024 to 2025, this machine ran fast. Bitcoin funding rates weighted by open interest averaged roughly 11% annualized for all of 2024; USDe supply peaked at around $14.8 billion around October 2025. By August 2026, the crypto basis contribution to yield was compressed to about 1%, and supply shrank to below $5 billion.

Relying solely on derivative rate spreads in the current crypto market can no longer support Ethena's growth logic, so the team chose to migrate the same structure to the recently hot tokenized stocks.

At the same time, USDe's growth subsidies have officially been shut off.

This month, Ethena officially announced that since the first airdrop in 2024, token incentives related to USDe growth have declined by approximately 85%. By the end of this month, all token incentives and inflation related to USDe will be completely halted, with no further distributions thereafter.

Crypto Briefing data shows that cumulative rewards distributed since the protocol's launch exceed $750 million, helping USDe reach approximately $15 billion in October 2025; supply subsequently contracted by over 65%. The trajectory of declining incentives has basically followed the cooling of crypto funding rates. Zeroing out at month's end is tightening a valve that was already mostly closed, rather than draining from full capacity all at once.

If that hedging yield reform addressed scale yield, then this update addresses "stop diluting ENA just to feed USDe." Going forward, expanding USDe will no longer involve printing additional ENA to subsidize holding costs. Since incentives have already dropped by about 85%, the incremental reduction in selling pressure is limited; it's more about rewriting the tokenomics from subsidized growth to "verifiable supply."

October 5 Large-Scale Unlock

In August of this year, the Ethena Foundation stated that starting from October 5, 2026, all remaining original investor unlocks would be completed ahead of schedule, with no investor tokens remaining in locked status thereafter; team tokens would still follow the original lockup and vesting arrangements. The Foundation's stated purpose is to eliminate the persistent supply overhang created by monthly VC unlocks.

The original arrangement was linear monthly vesting. After the cliff unlock period ended in April 2025, the investor tranche was approximately 78.125 million ENA per month, released on the 5th of each month, originally planned to continue until March 2028; core contributors were approximately 93.75 million per month, released on the same day; the Foundation tranche was approximately 40.625 million per month, released on the 2nd of each month. After the August reform, the investor line was canceled: the investor tranches for approximately 17 remaining months from November 2026 to March 2028 were merged into a single release on October 5, ending investor unlocks approximately 17 months ahead of the original schedule.

The monthly vesting for the team and Foundation is not included in this acceleration, and the team's regular tranche will still be released on October 5 as originally planned.

Parallel to the accelerated unlock is a seed round buyout targeting those who have already sold their holdings. The Foundation stated that it has purchased through over-the-counter transactions the locked tokens of certain major seed round investors who originally received allocations exceeding 0.25% of total supply and who sold ENA after the October 10, 2025 market peak; it issued par buyback offers to investors who did not sell after the peak, with no one accepting; among the selling group, one wallet also refused to be bought out. The Foundation did not disclose the buyout targets, amounts, or consideration.

Additionally, one of ENA's largest holding addresses, StablecoinX, holds approximately 3.03 billion tokens, about 20% of total supply, originally subject to a 48-month lockup under a PIPE transaction. On September 14, StablecoinX signed a waiver letter with Ethena OpCo and Ethena Foundation, subsequently disclosed through Form 8-K: starting from October 5, the lockup, vesting, and installment unlock restrictions on ENA held or to be delivered by StablecoinX would be permanently lifted, aligning with the release date the Foundation announced to other holders. Lifting restrictions does not mean free selling is possible. The document explicitly states that the relevant tokens are still held as inventory, and any sale, transfer, or disposal requires prior written consent from the Foundation; if sold due to operational capital or strategic needs, at least five business days' prior written notice is required, and the Foundation has a right of first refusal at the proposed price.

In response, some community members said that ENA's secondary market liquidity is highly centralized and controlled. The project team ostensibly abolished the lockup period but in reality formed a price alliance to control market pricing power after October.

With only one week left until the massive unlock, the day of unlocking may be the moment when the market uses capital to take a stance.