Since January 7, $BTC has initiated a downward trend, Altcoins have followed suit without exception, with $ENA experiencing a seven-day drop of -25%.
I just spent some time carefully reading 1/3 of the Ethena 2025 roadmap published, and I will share through this article the content worth paying attention to, as well as aspects that may affect the price, to help everyone judge possible opportunities for bottom-fishing ENA.
Before discussing ENA's price, it is necessary to understand the fundamentals of how the Ethena protocol operates—the performance of USDe (sUSDe).
1. USDe is steadily growing and occupies a place in decentralized finance (Defi).
The growth of USDe is directly related to Ethena's income potential and also has a certain impact on users (through participating in agreements with USDe-related assets).
Although USDe has only been operational for a short ten months, it has already achieved a supply volume of $6 billion (the third largest stablecoin). Furthermore, through cooperation with centralized exchanges (three of the top five exchanges already support USDe as collateral for derivatives), it has further expanded trading-level demand.
This is a very astonishing growth rate.
In addition, in the Defi field, USDe is deeply tied to many protocols such as Aave, Sky, Morpho, etc.
If you are hesitant to participate in the Ethena ecosystem due to concerns about stablecoins decoupling or crashing, perhaps USDe's achievements in Cefi and Defi can alleviate your worries?
Additionally, the author believes the most important point to mention: Don’t forget that USDe/sUSDe operates under a model that has the ability to generate interest, while USDC and USDT are profit-making for the issuing parties.
2. USDe will enter the Tradfi market.
According to the roadmap announcement, Ethena plans to launch 'iUSDe', which can be understood as a version of USDe that aligns with traditional financial operations. Its essence is similar to sUSDe, but it has an additional layer of transfer restrictions in the contract (possibly to comply with traditional financial security considerations).
I think this point can continue the topic I mentioned last time about whether ENA is a political concept coin, as they seem somewhat similar?
As the regulatory environment in the United States is expected to move towards being friendly to cryptocurrencies, we can expect more traditional capital to have the opportunity to enter the cryptocurrency space.
However, it is clearly difficult for traditional financial institutions to directly operate various tokens, thus highlighting the advantageous position of stablecoins with yield-generating capabilities, namely USDe.
From the perspective of profitability, USDe (sUSDe) has a reasonable yield operating model, and past data shows it can generate an annualized return of over 15%, which is an incentive to attract traditional financial capital.
Another aspect is whether to raise or lower interest rates. The cryptocurrency market has a certain degree of isolation from the traditional market, and allocating a fixed proportion of managed assets to cryptocurrency finance is also a way for traditional financial asset managers to diversify risk.
3. sUSDe will become a Payfi payment use case through Telegram.
Not only is it mentioned that USDe will enter the traditional financial market, but Ethena also intends to bring USDe into the daily lives of the general public. According to the roadmap information, by connecting Apple Pay through Telegram, sUSDe will become the underlying asset for daily consumption.
This further broadens the demand and application capabilities of USDe.
Next, you might want to know what factors I see that could affect ENA's price:
1. According to the roadmap announcement, the 'entry into Tradfi' mentioned in the second point above will occur in the first quarter of 2025 (Q1), and iUSDe will be released in February.
I believe that both of these events could cause fluctuations in ENA's short-term price, especially the announcement of future cooperation with traditional finance. If the partnering institution is a financial giant or the cooperation involves deep participation, it could be seen as positive news, driving up the price of ENA.
(Don’t forget that Ethena's investment and financing lineup itself includes giants in the traditional financial sector.)
2. More new projects will be launched by Ethena Network.
The aforementioned content is mostly based on the development of USDe, while the development of the Ethena network ecosystem will correspond more clearly to the price of ENA.
Since the launch of the Ethena network, two projects have emerged: Derive and Ethereal, and users can accumulate the initial token airdrop of these two projects through sENA.
We can expect more projects from the Ethena ecosystem to go live in 2025. Of course, these projects must allocate tokens to sENA holders, which will undoubtedly indirectly increase the demand for ENA tokens.
You can refer to the image below:
Finally, I strongly recommend everyone to read the Ethena 2025 roadmap document yourself. Although the content is extensive and includes many financial terms, I believe that after reading it, you will have a comprehensive understanding of Ethena.
(The document's content is relatively easy to understand, covering complete information that aids in investment decisions.)
If you have any questions about the above content or topics you'd like to discuss after reading the document, feel free to let me know!
------------------------
※Partners who wish to participate in the Ethena Q3 ENA airdrop can use my code:
eu54u
※The above content does not constitute investment advice. Users should operate according to their risk tolerance and participate in the investment market with caution, DYOR.
※The attached image is taken from the Ethena 2025 roadmap document.
