Is It Time to Buy ENA? Ethena Pay, The Equity Basis Trade, and The Token Cleanup

Ethena’s investment case centers on whether its yield business can extend beyond crypto basis trades, while its ENA token faces a changing supply picture. Lee said Ethena had not yet allocated capital to the equity basis trade but expected it to go live imminently, after an announcement roughly two weeks earlier. He argued that rising on-chain spot-stock and perpetual volumes now make the market large enough for Ethena to participate. Lido expected the new allocation to lift USDe’s weekly rate and market cap, potentially supporting Ethena Pay as well.

Ethena’s basis trade pairs a 50% long position with a 50% short, earning yield when the short receives funding payments. Lee described USDe’s other yield sources as loans to institutional borrowers seeking long Bitcoin or Ethereum exposure, limited-capacity DeFi lending, AAA tokenized funds, T-bills, and liquid reserve assets. He said Ethena manages $15 billion and has never lost a dime, including through past market turmoil; those are his claims, not a guarantee about future performance. Equity-basis exposure could produce higher earn rates and, in Lee’s view, may hold up better in crypto bear markets, when crypto basis returns can compress.

Lee expects stock perpetual trading eventually to exceed crypto perpetual trading, citing an equities market roughly 100 times larger than crypto. He said that shift would not make him bearish on crypto and expects tokenized assets and on-chain stock trading to continue growing. Ethena’s claimed edge is its experience executing basis trades across venues with billions of dollars in assets under management, which Lee said neobanks and other DeFi protocols would struggle to replicate. The opportunity depends on those markets continuing to develop and on the trade’s yields remaining attractive.

Ethena Pay is designed to turn that yield engine into a mainstream-style mobile product for saving, spending, and sending money globally. The app says it is non-custodial, with users controlling their wallet funds, while it connects crypto rails to fiat services and hides seed phrases, gas, bridging, and stablecoin choices. It was live in 50 countries and aimed to expand to 100–150. Balances earn rewards automatically, without a separate vault; Lido described the rate as up to 6% and somewhat fixed to shield users from fluctuations. The company presents balance monetization as its core metric and says yield can help support adjacent services such as on-ramps and card foreign-exchange transactions free or at cost.

Users can fund Ethena Pay by bank transfer in US dollars, euros, or British pounds, with no fees or FX fees, and funds are converted into stablecoins. The app supports transfers by handle without gas, bank transfers to recipients in other jurisdictions, and card spending from a digital-dollar balance; the card can be added to Apple Pay and offers up to 5% crypto cashback. Deposits can come from any chain but are routed to Avalanche, where the app is built. More than 10,000 people were on the waitlist, but onboarding was staged to gather feedback and manage capacity. The app could be downloaded in the US but was not yet usable there; Lido expected a launch in roughly three to four weeks.

The token story changed after the Ethena foundation bought out investors who had been selling unlocked tokens, reportedly at about $0.07. Lee said the move blindsided him and that he understood those investors no longer held tokens. Remaining investor tokens had an expedited unlock schedule, with ENA expected to be fully unlocked by October 5; Lee believed insider supply would then be on the market. A host who held ENA praised the announcement and said the token rose sharply afterward, but the cleanup does not by itself establish future demand or price performance.

Lee described StablecoinX as separate from Ethena: despite its NASDAQ ticker being USDE, its mandate is to hold and accumulate ENA, not to peg to a dollar. The company had changed CEOs, with a Franklin Templeton executive taking the role and Ted Chen remaining involved. A host saw it as a possible proxy for long exposure to stablecoins but cautioned that dilution and added structure make the exposure complex. The episode’s bullish case therefore rests on execution—especially equity-basis yields, distribution, and a simpler retail product—while the token’s supply transition and the durability of yield remain important uncertainties.