The Ethena Foundation has put forward a proposal for a vote to allocate almost all of the ecosystem's net revenue to a programmatic buyback of the governance token $ENA.
We are excited to announce four updates regarding the Ethena ecosystem, further details on each point are provided in the blog linked below:
— Ethena Foundation (@EthenaFndtn) August 27, 2026
1. Buyout of early investors:
The Ethena Foundation executed a buyout of all locked tokens from certain major seed investors that sold any...
Simultaneously, the project is changing the ownership structure of the protocol's value and reducing future emission pressure from investors.
All Revenue to $ENA
If the proposal is approved by the community, all net revenue from Ethena-related products and businesses will be used to buy $ENA on the market. The vote has received approval from the Risk Committee and has already been launched on the Snapshot platform.
In essence, this is about "switching fees": instead of distributing income among various ecosystem directions, it will be directed towards a token buyback. In the previous model, for example, revenue from the stablecoin $USDe was distributed between rewards for sUSDe holders and partnership programs.
At the same time, Ethena has not yet disclosed the voting timeline and does not guarantee that the new model will be adopted.
Foundation Takes Control of Protocol Value
Concurrently, Ethena Labs and the Ethena Foundation have entered into a Master Framework Agreement, under which the protocol's intellectual property and the rights to the value it creates are transferred exclusively to the Foundation.
In the future, these assets are to be managed by $ENA holders through community governance mechanisms. Under the agreement, Ethena Labs investors will have no residual rights to the protocol's cash flows.
Future Unlocks Removed for Investors
Another part of the update concerns $ENA tokenomics. The Foundation and major venture investors have agreed to cancel future monthly unlocks of tokens allocated to them.
This category was allocated 25% of the fixed supply of $ENA — 3.75 billion coins. The unblocking procedure included a one-year cliff period followed by a three-year monthly vesting. Now, the unlocked tokens of investors who agreed to the new scheme will be released from the schedule. Team assets will continue to enter circulation according to the original schedule.
Furthermore, the Foundation stated that it has repurchased the remaining locked $ENA from a number of major initial investors who had been selling tokens over the past nine months. The project did not disclose the details of the deal.
Thus, Ethena is simultaneously attempting to solve two problems with $ENA: to create sustainable demand through buybacks and to reduce potential pressure from future unlocks.
Amid the proposed changes to the tokenomics, the price of $ENA surged by nearly 12% in 24 hours. The asset is trading around $0.16 — in April 2024, at its peak, the price reached $1.5.
The market capitalization of $ENA is $1.54 billion. The total value locked on Ethena is $4.5 billion, of which ~$4 billion is in $USDe.
Recall that in August 2025, the project's stablecoin entered the top three largest assets in the "stablecoin" segment. But just three months later, its supply decreased by more than 50% due to falling yields.
