On 4 October 2025 there were 14.8 billion dollars of Ethena USDe in circulation, according to DefiLlama. As of 28 October 2026 there are 4.54 billion. About two thirds of the supply was redeemed in a year, through a market crash, a regulator’s shutdown order in Germany and a near-complete rotation of the backing out of crypto hedges, and by Ethena’s account redemptions kept working even on the worst night of that crash. DefiLlama’s feed showed it at 0.9994 dollars at about 10:00 UTC on 28 October 2026.
That record is the best way into a strange object. USDe is a dollar token without a dollar in a bank behind it, and it is not an algorithmic coin backed by its own sister token either. Ethena calls it a synthetic dollar: a basket of assets whose price risk is cancelled by short derivative positions, plus a growing share of stablecoins and loans. Judging it takes four pieces of knowledge: how the hedge works, what the backing holds in October 2026, where the sUSDe yield is earned, and which outside firms the structure leans on when markets break.
If you come from the previous lesson on CDP stablecoins such as DAI, USDS and BOLD, the contrast is sharp. A CDP stablecoin is a loan: the user locks 150 dollars or more of crypto to borrow 100 dollars of stablecoin, and the safety margin is the over-collateral. USDe is minted one for one. Its safety comes from a hedge, and the hedge lives partly on centralised exchanges. Fiat-backed coins such as USDT and USDC, which hold cash and Treasury bills, are covered in our guides what stablecoins are and USDT versus USDC.
Ethena USDe is a synthetic dollar, not a reserve dollar
Ethena’s documentation states it plainly in its overview: USDe “is not the same as a fiat stablecoin like USDC or USDT. USDe is a synthetic dollar”, backed with crypto assets and matching short futures positions, so its risks are different. The word synthetic matters. Nobody promises to hand you a dollar bill. What you can claim, if you are an approved user, is the backing itself: a mix of crypto, stablecoins and other assets worth about one dollar per token.
The idea is older than the token. Ethena’s docs credit an essay by Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder, published in March 2023, which described a synthetic dollar built from crypto collateral and derivatives. The supply series on Ethena’s own dashboard starts in November 2023 with a few hundred thousand tokens; our page on the Ethena project covers the company, its founder Guy Young and its ENA token.
Who can mint USDe and who can only buy it
USDe has two doors. The front door, minting and redemption, is open only to addresses that Ethena has whitelisted after KYC and anti-money-laundering checks. The FAQ adds that US users cannot access the application at all. These whitelisted firms, mostly market makers and funds, deposit assets such as USDT and receive newly minted USDe; or they hand back USDe and receive backing assets in return.
Everyone else uses the side door: buying USDe on decentralised exchanges like Curve and Uniswap or on centralised platforms that list it. This split explains a lot about how the peg works. When USDe trades at 0.99 dollars on a blockchain that runs exactly as written when it is called, holding and moving funds according to its code, without an intermediary able to change the outcome.">smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">pool, a whitelisted firm can buy it there and redeem it at Ethena for one dollar of backing, pocketing the gap. That arbitrage pulls the price back. It works only where the arbitrageurs can reach, which is why the October 2025 episode described below played out so differently on Binance and on chain.
The minting contract has limits written in code. According to Ethena’s page on key trust assumptions, a minter can only mint within 5 percent of the oracle price supplied by Pyth and RedStone, a gatekeeper role can pause minting and redemption, and the admin role sits with a multisig that needs 7 signatures, with seven-day timelocks on changes to core functions. Those are statements from the docs, so check the current multisig and timelock page before relying on them.
The delta-neutral trade behind USDe, step by step
Delta is the sensitivity of a position to the price of an asset. A portfolio is delta-neutral when a move in that price, up or down, leaves its dollar value roughly unchanged. Ethena builds this with two legs of the same size: a long position in the asset itself (spot ether, staked ether, bitcoin) and a short position in a perpetual futures contract on the same asset. The perpetual futures are derivatives with no expiry date that track the spot price through a periodic payment between longs and shorts.
A worked example with round numbers
The figures below are an illustration, not Ethena’s positions. A whitelisted firm deposits 100 dollars of ether and receives 100 USDe. Ethena keeps the ether with a custodian and opens a short perpetual position on ether worth 100 dollars on a derivatives exchange.
| Scenario | Value of the ether held | Profit or loss of the short | Total backing |
|---|---|---|---|
| ETH unchanged | 100 dollars | 0 | 100 dollars |
| ETH falls 10% | 90 dollars | +10 dollars | 100 dollars |
| ETH rises 10% | 110 dollars | -10 dollars | 100 dollars |
| ETH falls 40% | 60 dollars | +40 dollars | 100 dollars |
In every row the two legs add up to about 100 dollars, so each USDe stays backed by about one dollar of value. Ethena’s minting example in its how USDe works page follows the same pattern with USDT: about 100 dollars in, about 100 USDe out, less gas and hedging costs, and a short of about the same notional opened by the protocol, which says it earns no profit on minting or redeeming.
Funding rates: why shorts are usually paid
Perpetual futures have no settlement date, so exchanges keep their price close to spot with a funding payment exchanged every few hours. When the perpetual trades above spot, which happens when traders want leveraged long exposure, longs pay shorts. When it trades below, shorts pay longs. Crypto markets have leaned long for most of their history, so the short side has been paid more often than not.
Ethena’s documentation gives the numbers it relies on. For ether perpetuals, open-interest-weighted funding returned 16 percent in 2021, 0.6 percent in 2022, about 9 percent in 2023 and about 13 percent in 2024. Its risk page, with data up to 31 December 2024, counts 17.5 percent of days with negative funding for ETH and 15.9 percent for BTC; the longest negative streak lasted 13 days and the longest positive one 176 days. The docs admit that data from before Ethena existed cannot show the effect of Ethena itself, which became one of the largest shorts in the market.
That is the yield engine of the original design: staked ether earns a staking reward, the short earns funding, and the stablecoins in the buffer earn whatever their issuers or venues pay. Ethena’s older FAQ put the staking reward at “around 3-4%”, an undated figure. Put together, a 100-dollar position with 10 percent annualised funding would bring in about 10 dollars a year before costs, plus the staking reward. With funding at minus 5 percent, the same position would cost about 5 dollars a year, partly offset by staking.
What the hedge does not cover
A hedge cancels price risk only if both legs hold. Four things can make them drift apart. The basis can move: staked ether can trade at a discount to ether, so the long leg loses value that the short on ETH does not recover. The short can be liquidated if a fast rally drains the margin posted for it before the custodian tops it up. The exchange holding the short can fail or freeze. And the funding payments can turn against the position, which is a slow bleed rather than a sudden break.
Ethena’s liquidation-risk page argues that the short is run with very low leverage and that, since the Shapella upgrade, the stETH discount to ETH has never exceeded 0.3 percent, against 8 percent at its widest before. That is the protocol’s own reading of the history. The same page adds that proof of stake coin with a protocol that stakes it for you and issues a transferable token (such as Lido stETH or rETH) representing the deposit plus rewards, which you can use or sell while the coins stay staked.">liquid staking tokens are now a comparatively small part of the backing, which shrinks the basis problem but does not remove the other three.
Where the backing of USDe sits in October 2026
Here the lead that most explainers still repeat, “staked ETH long, perp short”, needs a correction. It describes the design of 2024 and 2025. Ethena’s backing assets overview now says that backing was concentrated in hedged spot crypto “for most of the protocol’s history” and that it is diversifying into non-crypto basis trades, DeFi lending, institutional lending, tokenised real-world assets and liquid stablecoins. The ETH carry trade is still the mechanism worth understanding. It is no longer most of the portfolio.
The live mix from Ethena’s transparency dashboard
Coindaro read the figures behind Ethena’s transparency dashboard on 28 October 2026, around 09:00 UTC. Total backing stood at 4.571 billion dollars against a USDe supply of 4.551 billion, a backing ratio of about 100.4 percent, with a separate reserve fund of 62.1 million dollars. The breakdown by category was as follows.
| Category (Ethena label) | Amount, USD | Share | Assets listed by Ethena |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeFi lending | 1,481 million | 32.4% | Aave, Morpho |
| Liquid stables | 1,324 million | 29.0% | USDT, USDC, USDtb, PYUSD |
| Crypto basis | 723 million | 15.8% | BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, BNB |
| Institutional lending | 704 million | 15.4% | BTC |
| RWA | 284 million | 6.2% | JAAA, STAC |
| Equity and RWA basis | 51 million | 1.1% | Tokenised shares such as CRCL, GOOGL, MSTR, and gold |
Read that table slowly. Less than a fifth of the backing, about 17 percent, is in a basis trade of any kind, crypto or equities. Almost a third is lent out on DeFi markets such as Aave and Morpho, and another 15 percent sits in institutional lending, which the dashboard lists against BTC. The dashboard does not break out how much of the liquid-stables line is USDtb, Ethena’s separate dollar token; DefiLlama counted 515.8 million USDtb in circulation on 28 October 2026, and Ethena’s docs say USDtb has been issued by Anchorage Digital Bank since October 2025.
How the mix moved since the October 2025 peak
Ethena’s asset-level series, which groups stablecoins and other dollar holdings under the label “Liquid Cash”, shows how fast the portfolio changed. The supply column comes from DefiLlama’s daily USDe series; the shares come from Ethena’s series at 00:00 UTC on each date.
| Date | USDe supply (DefiLlama) | “Liquid Cash” share | BTC share | ETH and staked ETH share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9 October 2025 | 14.65 billion | 58.4% | 29.3% | 11.6% |
| 1 January 2026 | 6.30 billion | 64.5% | 22.9% | 12.3% |
| 1 April 2026 | 5.88 billion | 88.6% | 3.8% | 7.4% |
| 1 July 2026 | 4.45 billion | 99.1% | 0.5% | 0.4% |
| 27 October 2026 | 4.60 billion | 83.9% | 9.3% | 4.2% |
In July 2026 the hedged crypto trade had almost disappeared from the backing. Ethena’s docs describe a dynamic allocation that moves towards liquid stables when funding is low, and the series is consistent with that policy, though the dashboard does not give the reason for each shift. By late October crypto exposure had come back to about 15 percent, along with small positions in SOL, XRP, BNB, tokenised equities and gold. Supply by chain, per DefiLlama on 28 October 2026: 2.45 billion on Ethereum, 585 million on Plasma, 367 million on Robinhood Chain, 364 million on Base and 317 million on Solana, with the rest spread over TON, Monad, BNB Chain and Mantle.
sUSDe and where the Ethena USDe yield comes from
Holding USDe in a wallet earns nothing from the protocol. Some exchanges and partner platforms run their own USDe reward programmes, which Ethena’s overview says it funds in part from protocol revenue. The protocol’s own yield goes to sUSDe, the staked version. A holder deposits USDe in a staking contract and receives sUSDe, a share of that vault. Ethena’s rewards page describes a token vault in which rewards are added to the contract over time, so each sUSDe becomes worth more USDe without its owner doing anything. The docs add that staked USDe “is not rehypothecated in any way”, meaning the staked coins themselves are not lent out to earn the reward. How vault shares like this work in wallets, pools and tax software is the subject of a later lesson.
The revenue streams behind the rate
Ethena’s protocol revenue page now lists five sources: funding and basis on crypto and non-crypto assets, overcollateralised DeFi lending, institutional lending, yield on tokenised real-world assets such as credit and Treasury funds, and rewards paid on liquid stablecoins. The weight of each changes with the backing table above. In 2024, when most of the backing was a hedged crypto trade, funding was the main driver. In October 2026, lending and stablecoin rewards carry most of the load.
| Measure | Value | Date and source |
|---|---|---|
| sUSDe 30-day average yield | 4.95% | Ethena dashboard data, updated 21 October 2026 |
| sUSDe 90-day average yield | 4.62% | Ethena dashboard data, updated 21 October 2026 |
| sUSDe average yield since inception | 10.30% | Ethena dashboard data, updated 21 October 2026 |
| sUSDe pool APY | 5.08% (30-day mean 4.99%) | DefiLlama yields, 28 October 2026 |
| sUSDe pool size on Ethereum | 1.19 billion dollars | DefiLlama yields, 28 October 2026 |
| Ethena gross fees, last 12 months | 241.8 million dollars | DefiLlama fees, 28 October 2026 |
The gap between the 10.3 percent lifetime average and today’s rate near 5 percent tells the story of the funding cycle. In 2024 leveraged longs paid shorts generously. In 2026 the rate looks closer to a money market fund than to a crypto carry trade, which is what you would expect from a portfolio that is mostly stablecoins and loans.
Why the yield is a reward, not interest
The docs use careful words. sUSDe holders receive “fully discretionary incentive rewards”. The Ethena Foundation, through a subsidiary, calculates the rate each week and distributes it the following week in several smaller payments, so that traders cannot arbitrage one large weekly drop. sUSDe “accrues only positive or flat rewards”: when protocol revenue is negative, the reserve fund absorbs it and no reward is paid, but the sUSDe exchange rate does not go down.
Two practical consequences follow. First, the published rate is backward-looking and can differ from aggregator figures. Second, nobody owes you that yield. A bank deposit pays contractual interest; a Treasury fund passes on what the bills earn; sUSDe pays what Ethena decides to distribute out of what it earned. That distinction also matters to regulators, as the BaFin section below shows. Yield-bearing stablecoins in general, from sUSDS to tokenised money market funds, are compared in the next lesson of this path.
One more number explains how USDe is used in DeFi. On Aave v3, DefiLlama shows USDe deposits of 584 million dollars on Plasma and 243 million on Ethereum as of 28 October 2026, earning a supply rate of about 0.2 percent. Lenders accept that because USDe deposited there is mainly collateral: users borrow other stablecoins against it, and the same collateral can be looped to multiply both the yield and the risk. Our lesson on DeFi composability and money legos follows one of those stacks layer by layer.
The risks of USDe, one by one
Negative funding and the reserve fund
If shorts must pay longs for weeks, the crypto basis leg loses money every day. Ethena’s funding risk page answers with two tools. The allocation can move out of perpetuals and into liquid stables, which the July 2026 figures above show happening at scale. And the reserve fund covers any period of negative revenue. The docs go as far as calling negative funding “a feature, rather than a bug of the system.”
The reserve fund is the weak point of that answer, for two reasons. It is small: 62.1 million dollars on 28 October 2026, about 1.4 percent of USDe supply. And it is not growing: Ethena’s reserve fund page says the share of revenue sent to it is “currently 0%”, with all revenue going to rewards and incentives. The fund was built in high-revenue periods. In 2026 the diversification away from perpetuals reduces the funding risk the fund was meant to absorb, but adds lending and credit risk that it was not sized for.
Custody: off-exchange settlement and who holds the assets
Ethena does not deposit its backing on the exchanges where it shorts. Its docs name four custodians, Copper, Ceffu, Kraken and Anchorage Digital, under arrangements it calls off-exchange settlement. The custodian keeps the assets in a segregated account and mirrors them to the exchange as margin; profits and losses are settled between custodian and exchange on a regular cycle. In Ethena’s words, it “delegates, but never transfers custody of, backing assets to derivatives exchanges”.
Ethena presents this as protection against the FTX scenario, in which an exchange holds the collateral and loses it. The price of that protection is trust in the custodians. Ethena’s custodial-risk page lists the failure modes itself: a custodian becoming unavailable, failing to perform its duties, or suffering an operational breakdown. The dashboard also lists monthly custodian attestations; the latest update at the time of writing was dated 10 October 2026.
Exchange risk: the hedge sits on centralised venues
The short leg lives on centralised derivatives exchanges. Ethena’s exchange-failure page names Binance, Bybit, Bitget, Deribit and OKX as venues. Its position data on 28 October 2026 showed about 826 million dollars of collateral delegated to exchanges, of which about 546 million at Binance, 144 million at OKX and 109 million at Bybit, while about 3.7 billion sat unallocated with custodians. One venue carried about two thirds of the hedge collateral. If one of them collapsed, Ethena would lose the unsettled profit of its shorts there and would need to reopen the hedge elsewhere, while the backing itself stays with the custodian. Exchanges also set their own collateral rules and price feeds, and that, rather than any failure of Ethena, is what went wrong on 10 October 2025. How these platforms hold and margin client assets is covered in our guide to how centralised exchanges work.
Lending, smart contract and governance risk
The 2026 portfolio brings risks of its own. About 32 percent of the backing is lent on DeFi markets, so a bad debt event or an exploit on Aave or Morpho could hit the backing directly. Institutional loans depend on the borrowers and on the collateral arrangements behind them. Tokenised credit funds such as JAAA can fall in value. On the contract side, the minting and staking contracts have admin roles held by a multisig; the docs describe timelocks and limits, but a stablecoin is only as safe as the keys that can change it.
10 October 2025: USDe at 0.65 dollars on Binance, 0.99 on chain
On the night of Friday 10 October 2025 more than 19 billion dollars of leveraged positions were closed, Decrypt reported, and 21Shares counted a fall of 13 percent for bitcoin and more than 16 percent for ether during the day. In the middle of it, USDe traded down to about 0.65 dollars on Binance’s spot market.
On Curve and Uniswap, at the same time, it stayed near 0.99 dollars, according to The Defiant; 21Shares also describes the Curve price holding far closer to one dollar. 21Shares puts the dislocation at about 40 minutes, and The Defiant gives the compensation window as 21:36 to 22:16 UTC.
Ethena says its own door never closed. Its founder Guy Young wrote on X, as quoted by The Defiant, that the mint and redeem function had “zero downtime” and was handling the largest number of withdrawals in its lifetime. The Defiant reported more than 1 billion dollars redeemed in a few hours and more than 2 billion within 24 hours. Those figures come from Ethena’s side.
Accounts of the cause differ, and Coindaro gives no verdict. The Defiant and 21Shares argue that Binance’s unified account valued USDe collateral using the price on its own thin order book instead of a cross-venue reference, so falling bids triggered forced liquidations of traders who held USDe as margin. Binance, in a statement on 12 October reported by Decrypt, said its core systems stayed operational, blamed “overall market conditions” and described reports of tokens hitting zero as a display error. It also said it had paid about 283 million dollars, within 24 hours, to users liquidated while holding USDe, BNSOL or wBETH as collateral in its margin, futures and loan products.
The lesson for a reader is narrow and useful. Where arbitrage could reach, on chain, whitelisted firms bought cheap USDe and redeemed it for backing, and the price held. Where a venue priced collateral from its own book, a liquidity hole became a price, and the price triggered liquidations. The backing of USDe was not the problem that night; the plumbing between USDe and a centralised exchange was.
The run that followed was slower and larger. DefiLlama’s series shows supply at 14.66 billion dollars on 10 October 2025, 12.50 billion on 15 October, 8.10 billion on 15 November and 6.30 billion on 1 January 2026. Holders left, the protocol paid them out of the backing, and the token stayed close to one dollar while it shrank. A coin without real backing cannot shrink this way: redemptions would have broken it.
USDe and the regulators: BaFin, MiCA and the US
Germany: BaFin orders Ethena GmbH to wind up
Ethena’s German company, Ethena GmbH, based in Frankfurt am Main, issued USDe in the EU under a MiCA transitional rule and applied to BaFin for authorisation in July 2024. On 21 March 2025 BaFin said it had found “serious shortcomings” in the authorisation procedure, banned the company from offering USDe to the public, ordered the reserve assets frozen by the custodians and appointed a special representative. On 4 April it imposed a coercive fine of 600,000 euros because its first measures were not fully complied with.
Ethena GmbH withdrew its application on 3 April 2025, and the regulator ordered the winding-up of its business on 14 April. In that notice of 15 April 2025, BaFin classified USDe as an asset-referenced token and wrote: “Trading in USDe tokens on the secondary market is no longer permissible in the European Union.” Holders could claim redemption from the GmbH until 6 August 2025; from 7 August claims could only be made against Ethena (BVI) Limited, and GmbH-issued USDe would be exchanged only for USDC. Ethena GmbH lodged an objection to BaFin’s decisions on 22 April 2025, and BaFin described its measures as immediately enforceable but not yet final. In a notice dated 6 June 2025 BaFin also said it had grounds to suspect that Ethena (BVI) Ltd. was offering sUSDe in Germany as a security without the required prospectus. That is a suspicion stated by the regulator, not a court finding.
MiCA and the EU today
Ethena’s docs now state that sUSDe is not offered to people living or registered in the EU or the European Economic Area. Under MiCA, asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens may not pay interest: Article 40 bars issuers of asset-referenced tokens, and crypto-asset service providers, from granting interest on them, Article 50 does the same for e-money tokens, and both treat any benefit linked to how long a holder keeps the token as interest. In the sources Coindaro checked on 28 October 2026, no EU authorisation for USDe appears. Our guide to MiCA regulation explains the categories.
United States: the GENIUS Act, the SEC and taxes
In the US, Ethena’s app is closed to US users. The GENIUS Act, signed on 18 July 2025, regulates “payment stablecoins”: tokens whose issuer is obliged to redeem them for a fixed amount of money. It bars permitted issuers from paying holders “any form of interest or yield” for simply holding the coin, and from 18 July 2028 it makes it unlawful for a digital asset service provider to offer a payment stablecoin to people in the US unless a permitted issuer stands behind it. Whether a synthetic dollar like USDe falls under that definition has not been settled by a regulator in the sources checked; Ethena’s other dollar token, USDtb, is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank according to Ethena’s docs.
Coindaro found no SEC or CFTC action targeting USDe or sUSDe in the sources checked on 28 October 2026. For taxes, the IRS treats crypto as property, and its virtual currency FAQ says exchanging virtual currency held as a capital asset for another virtual currency triggers a capital gain or loss. Swapping USDT for USDe is such an exchange, even if the gain is a few cents. How sUSDe rewards are taxed, as they accrue or only when sUSDe is sold, has not been addressed by the IRS for this token; our guide to crypto taxes in the United States sets out the general rules. This is not tax advice.
Is USDe the next UST? A point-by-point comparison
The question comes up every time USDe grows fast, because TerraUSD also offered a high dollar yield and also called itself decentralised. UST collapsed in May 2022; our history of DeFi tells the full story. The founder of Terraform Labs, Do Kwon, pleaded guilty to fraud charges in August 2025 and was sentenced to 15 years in prison in New York on 11 December 2025, Decrypt reported. Here is how the two designs compare.
| Point | UST (Terra, 2022) | USDe (Ethena, October 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| What backs one token | Nothing outside the system: one dollar’s worth of newly minted LUNA on redemption | About one dollar of assets: stablecoins, loans, RWAs and hedged crypto, 100.4% backing ratio on 28 October 2026 |
| Redemption | Burn UST, receive LUNA at its market price | Whitelisted firms burn USDe and receive backing assets |
| Reflexive loop | Redemptions minted LUNA and pushed its price down, which weakened UST further | No governance token in the redemption path; redemptions pay out existing assets |
| Source of yield | Deposits on Anchor Protocol earned about 20%, Decrypt recalled | Funding, lending, RWA and stablecoin rewards; 4.95% 30-day average on 21 October 2026 |
| Stress record | Lost its peg in May 2022 and never recovered | Supply fell from 14.8 to 4.5 billion dollars in a year while redemptions kept working |
| Main remaining risks | Realised in 2022 | Custodians, exchanges, lending exposure, negative revenue beyond a small reserve fund |
| Legal record | Criminal fraud conviction of the founder | BaFin ordered the German issuer to wind up in 2025 (objection lodged); no SEC action found |
The honest answer is that USDe is not a new UST, because its failure mode is different. UST had no assets to sell when confidence went; it could only print LUNA. USDe holds assets that can be paid out, and it proved that when two thirds of its supply left. But different is not risk-free. USDe depends on firms and venues outside the blockchain, on a reserve fund that covers about 1.4 percent of supply, and, in 2026, on the health of the lending markets it supplies. The question to ask is not “algorithmic or not” but “what has to fail, and who absorbs the loss?”. The deeper story of algorithmic coins and the Terra collapse will get its own lesson in the blockchain course.
How to check a synthetic dollar yourself
USDe cannot be minted on a testnet by the public, since minting needs a whitelisted address. The hands-on part of this lesson is reading, and it costs nothing. These checks apply to any synthetic or yield-bearing dollar.
- Open the issuer’s transparency page and note the date of the figures: total backing, supply, backing ratio, reserve fund. On 28 October 2026 Ethena showed 4.571 billion of backing for 4.551 billion USDe.
- Read the category breakdown and ask what share depends on a centralised exchange, a custodian, a lending market or a credit fund. Each one is a separate failure point.
- Check the proof-of-reserves history. Ethena’s dashboard lists weekly reports confirmed by Harris and Trotter, Chainlink and LlamaRisk; the latest, dated 23 October 2026, marked the backing as delta-neutral and over-collateralised.
- Compare the price across venues on a block explorer or a price aggregator. A gap between a centralised exchange and on-chain pools, like the one on 10 October 2025, says more about the venue than about the backing.
- Read the staking contract on Etherscan before depositing: the sUSDe exchange rate, any cooldown before withdrawal, and who holds the admin keys.
- Note where you live. EU residents are excluded from sUSDe by Ethena’s own terms and BaFin considers USDe secondary trading not permissible in the EU; US users cannot use the app.
None of these checks tells you whether to buy anything, and this lesson gives no investment advice. They tell you what you would be trusting. The next lesson of the DeFi path, on yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenised money market funds, applies the same questions to sUSDS, BlackRock’s BUIDL and their peers.
