Ethena USDe

USDe is Ethena's synthetic dollar, kept near $1 through crypto hedging, lending and credit funds.

USDe is a 'synthetic dollar' issued by Ethena BVI and developed by Ethena Labs, founded by Guy Young. Unlike fiat stablecoins such as USDT or USDC, it is not backed one-to-one by dollars in a bank. The original design held crypto such as ether and bitcoin and sold matching perpetual futures, so price moves cancelled out (a 'delta-neutral' hedge) and the protocol earned the funding payments between traders. USDe launched quietly in December 2023 and publicly in February 2024.

The backing has changed a great deal. After funding payments shrank, Ethena moved most of it into lending: at the end of June 2026 about 46% was lent to DeFi lending markets, about 35% held in liquid stablecoins, 11.2% in tokenised credit funds, 6.9% lent to institutions and only 1% in the crypto hedge. In August 2026 a framework was put to Ethena's Risk Committee for a new hedge that holds tokenised stocks and shorts matching equity perpetual futures.

Only approved firms that pass identity checks can create or redeem USDe directly with the issuer; everyone else buys and sells it on exchanges. Holders can stake USDe to receive sUSDe, which grows in value as Ethena passes on its protocol revenue from lending, credit funds, stablecoin rewards and hedges. None of the current revenue goes to the Reserve Fund: all of it is directed to these rewards and other incentives, while the fund, about $62 million at the end of June 2026, is meant to absorb losses.

USDe grew to nearly $14.7 billion in October 2025, then shrank after a market crash in which it briefly traded at $0.65 on Binance before recovering. On 27 September 2026 about 4.9 billion USDe were in circulation. In the EU, Germany's BaFin ordered Ethena's German entity in April 2025 to reverse its issuance of USDe and said trading USDe on the secondary market is no longer permissible in the EU; sUSDe is not offered to EU residents.