Ethena Foundation said it has bought out locked ENA held by early investors who had been selling the token, and on Thursday put a fee-switch proposal that would fund ENA buybacks to a tokenholder vote. Ethena described those moves as responses to what it called the project’s two standing doubts.
ENA rose about 16% in the hours after the announcement to around $0.17, extending a rally that had already lifted the token about 70% over the past week.
Foundation repurchased locked ENA from early investors who sold
According to the announcement, the purchases were completed over the counter during the past two weeks. They covered investors who were originally allocated more than 0.25% of supply and sold any ENA after the Oct. 10, 2025 market peak.
The Foundation said one wallet declined the offer, citing continued conviction in Ethena. Investors who had not sold were offered a repurchase at par. In the announcement, the Foundation said: “Not a single investor agreed.”
The remaining investor tokens will unlock in one batch on Oct. 5, ending the monthly unlock schedule. Team tokens will continue under their original vesting plan.
Ethena published the wallets but did not disclose the stake sizes or the prices paid. The announcement also said StablecoinX, a digital-asset treasury company, still holds about 20% of supply under a lockup described in its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Buyback mechanism has a supply trigger
Ethena’s announcement said the fee switch would use 95% of net revenue accrued across all business lines to buy back ENA. But the design works across two separate layers of numbers.
The milestone schedule determines how much protocol revenue is diverted. The rate starts at 5% once USDe circulating supply reaches $7.5 billion and rises to 25% above $25 billion. Separately, Ethena said 95% of the net revenue paid to the Foundation would go to buybacks, with the rest reserved for growth.
The proposal’s illustrative table lists the first rung at $22.5 million a year, without saying whether that figure already reflects the Foundation’s retained share.
USDe supply is about $4.04 billion, down roughly 73% from its peak of nearly $15 billion in October 2025.
Blockworks Advisory, which sits on Ethena’s Risk Committee, said it backtested the design across 705 days and supports it. Still, it stated the arithmetic plainly: “At today’s USDe supply of $4.07B the schedule takes nothing, so nothing in this document is immediate.”
Existing revenue recipients would bear the cost
In its analysis, Blockworks Advisory wrote that the diverted share would come off gross protocol revenue and be split pro rata across everything that revenue currently funds. That means turning on the mechanism would cut the sUSDe staking distribution, as well as Ethena’s partner incentives and Aave reward lines, by the same rate.
Based on the payout mix over the past month, the firm estimated that a 5% take would cost about $8.8 million a year.
The schedule replaces parameters set by the Risk Committee in 2024. Under that earlier framework, USDe supply had to reach $6 billion, cumulative revenue had to hit $250 million, and reserve fund capitalization ranked ahead of any payout.
Blockworks Advisory wrote that the new schedule contains no Reserve Fund term and no competitiveness condition. It added, however, that the reserve has drawn no allocation since December 2024.
The 2024 framework directed revenue to sENA, the staked token. The new proposal would instead buy ENA on the open market.
Vote closes on Sept. 2
Voting closes on Sept. 2.
Ethena also said its Master Framework Agreement with Ethena Labs remains an agreement in principle. Under that agreement, protocol intellectual property and economic upside would be assigned to the Foundation rather than to Ethena Labs equity holders. Ethena said it expects to publish the agreement in October.
The project has also filed with the Blockworks Token Transparency Framework, where the submission is marked partial with six gaps.