Amid cycles of obsession with memecoins and doggie tokens, Ethena Labs founder and CEO Guy Young has built one of the largest and most systemically important crypto pipelines.
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In just two years, Young has grown Ethena from an idea (admittedly taking inspiration from BitMEX co-founder and crypto guru Arthur Hayes) into a $15 billion protocol by aggressively expanding, cutting out distribution partnerships across exchanges and on-chain venues, and bringing its synthetic USDe and yield-earning sUSDe to every corner of the market. The result is the emergence of a new digital token, or yieldcoin, that exists at the intersection of the DeFi orbit and underlying trading on TradFi.
Nick Van Eck, founder of the stablecoin protocol AUSD, recently said that Ethena actually opens a new era of crypto-native asset management, and income is the main product. Ethena brings earnings fully on-chain, opening up the popular hedge fund trade – the ETH/BTC basis trade – to anyone with a wallet, and encapsulates it in a simple $1 denominated instrument. If Van Eck is right, this could be a business line worth $500 billion to $1 trillion over the next decade or so.
Young then took Ethena a step further into the booming stablecoin issuance business, taking on giants like Stripe and Circle. Ethena is helping crypto projects like MegaETH, Sui, and Solana-based Jupiter launch their own digital dollar tokens on top of Ethena’s infrastructure, as stablecoins continue to enter the mainstream as one of blockchain’s largest use cases.
