Standard Chartered opened coverage of Ethena's ENA token on Wednesday with a year-end 2028 price target of $2, roughly seven times the token's current level near $0.28. The bank also laid out a path of $0.42 by the end of 2026 and $1.10 in 2027, and said it expects ENA to beat both Bitcoin and Ethereum through 2028.
That's a big call for a token tied to a stablecoin that's been shrinking, not growing. USDe supply has fallen to about $4.9 billion, down more than half from a peak above $10 billion.
The delta-neutral trade stopped paying
Ethena launched USDe in late 2023 and it became one of crypto's fastest-growing stablecoins. The pitch was a delta-neutral strategy: long spot crypto, short perpetual futures, collect the funding. At times that trade threw off returns above 20%, and deposits piled into USDe and its yield-bearing sibling sUSDe.
Those returns are gone. Standard Chartered now estimates Ethena's blended yield across its strategies sits at about 5.2%. When the basis trade compresses, the stablecoin stops selling itself, and supply bleeds. That's the story behind the drop from $10 billion to under $5 billion.
Ethena hasn't stood still. The protocol has widened its yield sources to include DeFi lending, institutional lending, liquid stablecoins, real-world assets, and newer basis trades tied to equities and commodities. Whether those replace the old crypto funding trade at scale is the open question.
The $40 billion assumption
Standard Chartered's $2 target rests on a forecast that USDe supply hits $40 billion by 2028. That means regaining the old peak and then roughly quadrupling it. It's not a modest assumption.
The bank frames it inside a broader tokenization call: stablecoins and real-world assets reaching about $4 trillion by the end of 2028 from roughly $350 billion now, with RWAs on blockchains rising from about $40 billion to $2 trillion. If that wave arrives, a large synthetic dollar issuer would be one way to play it.
Why the fee switch matters
Ethena's approved fee-switch framework kicks in at $7.5 billion of USDe supply. The protocol is below that first threshold today, so nothing is flowing yet. Once it clears, 95% of qualifying net revenue paid to the Ethena Foundation from covered businesses goes toward ENA buybacks.
Blockworks Advisory modeled Ethena's share of gross revenue rising with supply — about 5% around $7.5 billion, reaching 20% by $20 billion, using a 6% protocol yield as an illustrative assumption. Standard Chartered's math: at $40 billion, ENA purchases could equal roughly 23% of the token's current market value annually if the price stayed flat.
The bank points to Uniswap as the comparison. UNI's annualized buyback percentage has settled around 3% to 4% as the token appreciated after its own fee switch went live. The implication is that Ethena's buyback, if it ever starts, would be a much larger share of market cap — and that's the bull case in one number.
What has to happen first
Two things gate the whole thesis. USDe supply has to climb back above $7.5 billion to flip the switch, then keep going to $40 billion for the buyback math to look anything like Standard Chartered's estimate. Ethena is also building outside the core synthetic dollar — white-label stablecoins and Ethena Pay — which the bank treats as part of the story rather than a side project.
For now, ENA trades near $0.28 and USDe sits at $4.9 billion. The next checkpoint is the $7.5 billion threshold. Until supply turns, the target is a forecast, not a trade.
