Something strange is happening around Ethena. On paper, this protocol looks like one of the most productive machines in all of crypto, yet its token trades below the level large investors were willing to pay only a few months ago. In September, institutional buyers participated in a structured round at a reported price near $0.29, establishing a clear reference point for how smart money valued Ethena’s future cash flows. Today, the token changes hands about $0.20 below that figure, implying the market is valuing the same protocol at a steep discount relative to what sophisticated investors recently paid to accumulate size. That kind of gap usually signals either a serious mispricing or that something in the backdrop has changed so quickly that the public has not caught up yet.
Ethena’s fundamentals tell a very different story from its spot price. Public reporting and analytics consistently place Ethena among the top revenue generators in DeFi, with cumulative protocol revenue surpassing $290 million by mid 2025 and crossing the $500 million mark later in the year as USDe growth accelerated. Weekly revenue has reached tens of millions of dollars, and at recent run rates Ethena is on pace to generate hundreds of millions annually from its synthetic dollar engine and hedging operations. Framed through a traditional lens, a $365 million annualized revenue stream at roughly a 4.3x price to sales multiple looks less like a speculative meme and more like a profitable fintech or payments network priced at a modest growth multiple.
The puzzle deepens when looking at ecosystem traction. Ethena’s core product, the synthetic dollar USDe and its treasury backed sibling USDtb, has become one of the largest stablecoin complexes in DeFi, with USDe alone surpassing $12 billion in supply and breaking stablecoin growth records. Major protocols are not just integrating USDe as a side option, they are making it the backbone of their own stable assets and monetary systems. Berachain’s Honey stablecoin has been designed to be fully backed by USDe, effectively outsourcing its stability and yield engine to Ethena’s infrastructure. MegaETH’s plans to use USDe as collateral for its layer 1 oriented stable suggest that entire new base chains are comfortable tying their economic layer to Ethena’s mechanism, something that usually reflects deep due diligence by their backers.
The Jupiter partnership takes this from a DeFi native story to one with much broader reach. Jupiter, Solana’s dominant DEX aggregator, is launching JupUSD as a native stablecoin and is explicitly backing it with Ethena’s dollar products. The plan calls for converting about $750 million of existing USDC liquidity into JupUSD, positioning it as the primary unit of account for trading, lending, and mobile interfaces across an ecosystem with up to 5 million users. Over time, JupUSD will be supported not only by USDtb but also by USDe, which means a large slice of Solana’s transactional and leverage flow will indirectly rest on Ethena’s balance sheet and hedging engine. That type of embedded demand is hard to turn off once it reaches scale.
On the derivatives side, the early performance of products built on top of USDe is showing real volume, not just hype. Hyena, a structured perps product on Hyperliquid that combines Ethena’s yield bearing stable with a high throughput futures engine, crossed tens of millions in trading volume within its first days and quickly climbed toward the 9 figure mark within its first week. Hyperliquid as a venue has already demonstrated its ability to push billions of dollars in daily perpetual volume, which means any successful structured product there can rapidly compound into serious fee flows. For Ethena, every integration that uses USDe or a yield bearing derivative as collateral ties protocol revenue to the growth of on chain leverage, a trend that has been rising across multiple platforms.
Funding rates rounding back into positive territory add yet another tailwind to this story. Ethena’s core engine depends on delta neutral basis trades that earn the funding and yield spread between spot and derivatives markets. When funding is positive across major venues, that model becomes extremely profitable, because traders are effectively paying the protocol to maintain its hedges. The recent shift toward positive funding, combined with record perpetual volumes on exchanges like Hyperliquid, creates a macro environment that tends to magnify Ethena’s revenue rather than compress it. A protocol that already sits among the top 3 or 4 revenue generators in DeFi under neutral conditions sees its earnings power expand significantly when leverage markets heat up.
All of this brings the conversation back to the institutions that supposedly “do not buy 45% above spot to lose money.” In September, when they were writing checks at $0.29, Ethena had already proven its basic model, but much of this ecosystem build out was still theoretical or early stage. Since then, cumulative revenue has climbed higher, USDe supply has grown, major ecosystems like Solana and Berachain have committed to Ethena backed stablecoins, and derivatives products like Hyena have demonstrated strong product market fit. Yet the token trades below that institutional entry price, implying that public markets are either skeptical about the durability of this growth or simply have not priced in the compounding effect of these integrations.
The deeper story is one of a protocol that has quietly transitioned from speculative concept to core infrastructure. Ethena is weaving its synthetic dollars into multiple execution layers, from Ethereum to Solana to emerging L1s, and is latching onto the fastest growing segment of crypto, which is on chain leverage and perps. Its revenue scales with volatility and leverage, its stablecoins are being treated as first class citizens in major ecosystems, and its products are becoming the collateral backbone for other projects’ monetary systems. When institutions pay a 45% premium to current spot, then watch the underlying protocol expand its footprint across DeFi and derivatives, the more interesting question may not be why Ethena is trading below that level today, but how long that gap can persist if the current growth trajectory continues.
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