Key Takeaways
- Ethena’s $100M token sale is backed by Franklin Templeton and F-Prime Capital.
- Ethena Labs’ USDe stablecoin remains fully collateralized despite the recent Bybit hack.
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Ethena raised $100 million through a private sale of ENA tokens in December, with Franklin Templeton and F-Prime Capital among the investors, according to a Monday report from Bloomberg.
F-Prime Capital, formerly known as Fidelity Biosciences, is affiliated with FMR LLC, Fidelity Investments’ parent company, through Devonshire Investors. The funding round also included other prominent investors like Dragonfly Capital Partners, Polychain Capital, and Pantera Capital.
The fundraising will support the development of a new token targeting traditional financial institutions. Ethena also plans to launch its own blockchain using the raised capital.
Ethena Labs operates two primary digital assets: the ENA governance token, which has a total supply of 15 billion tokens with approximately 3.12 billion in circulation, and the USDe stablecoin, a synthetic dollar-pegged asset that reached $1.3 billion in supply during the Ethena Shard Campaign.
The company recently launched USDtb, a new stablecoin backed by BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), holding 90% of its reserves in the fund. USDtb is available on multiple networks including Ethereum, Base, Solana, and Arbitrum, and is designed to support USDe stability during market stress.
Following a recent $1.4 billion hack on the Bybit exchange, Ethena Labs confirmed that its USDe stablecoin remains fully collateralized, with exposure to Bybit limited to less than $30 million. The company maintains its crypto assets in off-exchange custody to protect against such security breaches.
Ethena plans to launch iUSDe
Ethena is set to introduce iUSDe, a specialized version of its sUSDe stablecoin, designed to facilitate adoption by traditional financial institutions, the team shared in their 2025 roadmap. iUSDe is intended to be similar to sUSDe but with additional features such as wrapped contracts to enable transfer restrictions, making it more suitable for fixed-income portfolios and offering a 20% annual percent yield.
By implementing transfer restrictions and partnering with regulated investment managers, Ethena aims to create a compliant gateway for TradFi to access the high-yield opportunities of its stablecoin, effectively bridging the gap between legacy finance and the burgeoning crypto ecosystem.
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