ENA rose to $0.189 on Aug. 28, according to Bitget market data. Ten days earlier, the token had been trading around $0.08. Over a longer stretch, the drawdown had been severe: from its April 2024 all-time high of $1.52, ENA had at one point fallen by more than 90%.
The broader market recovery helped, but the sharper repricing followed an Aug. 27 announcement from the Ethena Foundation. The package addressed several of the issues that had kept pressure on ENA for much of the past two years.
Supply-side pressure gets a direct overhaul
One of the biggest overhangs on ENA had been recurring token unlocks. Seed investors, Series A participants, team allocations and advisor allocations were all part of the release schedule, creating a steady source of sell pressure in the secondary market.
The Ethena Foundation targeted that problem first.
- It repurchased locked ENA held by seed investors.
- It moved to eliminate all future monthly VC unlocks.
According to the announcement, the foundation has already completed the purchase of all locked ENA from some major seed investors that had sold ENA during the past nine months. In practical terms, those still-locked tokens are no longer set to drip into the open market.
The second measure is broader. The foundation said it reached an agreement with major investors to remove the sell pressure associated with future monthly VC unlocks by releasing unvested tokens.
Additional reporting cited in the source said the remaining original investors will see their unlocks accelerated starting on Oct. 5, 2026, after which no investor tokens will remain locked. Team tokens were left unchanged and will stay under the original vesting schedule.
That materially changes a trading setup in which the market had repeatedly focused on ENA's unlock calendar.
Protocol revenue is now being tied more directly to ENA
The second shift is on value accrual. Before this proposal, USDe had already become the third-largest stablecoin and the Ethena protocol was generating tens of millions of dollars in monthly fees, yet ENA holders had little beyond governance rights.
The foundation has now introduced a governance proposal that would use 95% of protocol net revenue for programmatic ENA buybacks in the secondary market.
The design comes with clear triggers. Buybacks would begin once USDe circulating supply reaches $7.5 billion. As supply passes milestones such as $10 billion and $15 billion, the buyback share would step up.
Under that setup, faster USDe expansion would feed into higher protocol revenue and stronger buy-side support for ENA.
The fee-switch idea is not new. Community discussion began in November 2024. In September 2025, the foundation said the activation conditions had been met, citing USDe supply above $6 billion and cumulative revenue above $250 million. The vote and implementation, though, only arrived now.
Ethena had run buybacks before. In the second half of 2025, a repurchase program called DAT, short for Decentralized Autonomous Trust, deployed about $890 million across two phases. That plan used reserve funds as a one-off measure. The new proposal would turn buybacks into a standing mechanism linked to protocol revenue.
The foundation also moved to realign economic rights
A third part of the announcement deals with who captures the protocol's economic value.
Like many DeFi projects, Ethena had a split structure: Ethena Labs is a traditional company with equity, while ENA is the ecosystem token. Those two layers did not automatically point value to the same place.
The Ethena Foundation said it has reached a master framework agreement with Ethena Labs. Under that agreement, intellectual property created by the protocol and the related value attribution will belong exclusively to the foundation and be governed by ENA holders. Equity investors in the Labs entity will no longer be entitled to residual cash flows.
If implemented as described, value generated across Ethena-branded business lines would flow to the foundation first, then be allocated through ENA-holder governance. For the market, that narrows the gap between protocol economics and token-holder interests.
Positioning by outside investors added to the rerating
Mechanics were not the only part of the story. External positioning also fed into the move.
ENA had dropped from $1.52 in April 2024 to an all-time low of $0.0699 in June 2026. After that decline, some market participants began treating the token as a discounted exposure to a protocol that still generated substantial annual revenue.
In June 2026, Coinbase Ventures publicly said it had bought ENA in the secondary market and had entered into a partnership with Ethena to develop onchain financial products.
On Aug. 6, Arthur Hayes bought 10.9 million ENA, bringing his total holdings to 22.64 million tokens worth about $4 million. He said that if rising dollar liquidity pushes BTC higher, a recovery in Bitcoin basis yields could draw capital back into USDe, and he added that ENA could have room for a 5x move in the coming months.
On Aug. 25, BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes again commented on ENA, saying, "OTC brokers are starting to contact us asking about borrowing dollars. Rates are still too low right now, but this is a good sign that the basis trade is coming back. ENA will benefit from this, and the upside is huge."
The main risk remains USDe contraction
The new framework does not remove the core dependency behind the buyback story.
Revenue-funded repurchases only work if the protocol keeps generating revenue, and that depends heavily on USDe scale. USDe supply has already fallen from about $15 billion at its October 2025 peak to roughly $4 billion now.
That leaves the revenue base under pressure. If USDe does not return to growth, the support expected from revenue-linked buybacks may prove harder to realize in practice.