As Ethena broadens its scope into RWAs excited to bring our first partner to market for USDe backing outside of BlackRock BUIDL with Janus Henderson JAAA.
Importantly, as we continue to partner with asset managers like Janus Henderson as allocators into their products, we simultaneously broaden USDe distribution into their own institutional distribution channels we wouldn't otherwise have access to.
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Ethena has partnered with Janus Henderson, a $480 billion asset manager, to allocate and support the distribution of their liquid high-quality CLO tokenized funds.
As part of the partnership Janus Henderson has made a strategic investment into Ethena's governance token, will allocate into USDe as part of their treasury cash management, and is also exploring avenues to distribute USDe to their client base via exchange traded instruments.
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Excited to partner with Coinbase for the first time to support their dollar savings products. The upcoming integration next week will be the first time Ethena products are available for their 100m+ user base.
Given the evolving nature of the Clarity Act, we expect further potential tailwinds for onchain native products like USDe from idle balances on exchanges, and Ethena is well positioned to support this transition.
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Ethena and
@coinbase have partnered to grow onchain finance and savings products for their 100m+ userbase, with the first growth initiative launching next week.
Alongside this partnership Coinbase Ventures have also made their first investment into Ethena on the open market.
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Agree with this and would also encourage all asset issuers to consider rate limits at the mint & redemption level, as well as a custom rate limit configuration on top of LZ OFTs.
We built a solution on top of the standard OFT to throttle cross chain transfers at $10m per hour for every DVN, in addition to the $10m per block rate limit on the mint contract. The former would have prevented Kelp, the latter Resolv.
In a disaster scenario where the LZ DVN is compromised you can at least contain the damage to $10m per chain per hour before stepping in to shut down transfers entirely.
Yes it’s a slightly annoying inconvenience for users 99% of the time, but a worthwhile trade off to avoid going to zero.
If you would like support on adding the same custom OFT configuration please reach out directly to myself or the team.
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Feels like pooled lending protocols would benefit from a rate limit on the supply of an asset being deposited for collateral
Like, if the current supply is 100m and the supply cap is 300m, the supply should only be allowed to go to 110m in the next 10 minutes. Nobody needs to deposit all 200m in one shot
This matters because if/when an exotic asset is hacked, the impact of the hack is constrained by the size of the exit paths for that asset. Especially when you consider that many hacks are infinite mint bugs… there the size of the exits literally determines the size of the hack.
Lending protocols are often the largest exits (DEX liquidity is usually pretty small). Having a “smart cap” that is a bit above current supply, which can adjust over a few hours to the true cap, would make a huge difference. It would have saved rsETH depositors $200m today
This also raises an interesting point: asset issuers should want this too. If you are an asset issuer who issues receipt tokens which have a redemption delay, then you actually aren’t worried about a hacker redeeming with you. But you need possible exits to be as small as possible while not impeding normal users. High supply caps need to be seen as a liability, rather than a sign of stature.
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Out of an abundance of caution we are temporarily pausing our LayerZero OFT bridges from Ethereum mainnet until the root cause of the rsETH incident has been identified.
We expect the pause to last ~6 hours and will provide updates on this temporary pause as we receive them.
To reiterate, we can confirm Ethena has no exposure to rsETH, and remains >101.0% overcollatereralised.
Proof of reserves are typically provided on a weekly basis but we will be providing a refreshed version in the next few hours given the existing circumstances.
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Since 10/10 Ethena was poorly positioned for what has been a material regime change.
In the last few months we have been building out the infrastructure to securely access alternate sources of safe and scalable collateral to better position the business for these periods of downturn.
This is an important piece of work which should have been done a long while ago, but now positions USDe backing to experience less rate volatility during periods of suppressed crypto native interest rates.
Going forward, once approved by the independent risk committee, USDe will have access to:
-Basis on non crypto assets including commodities and equities
-Institutional triparty collateralized lending via
@coinbase @krakenfx @Anchorage and others
-Prime lending across CeFi and
@HyperliquidX
-Liquid high quality non-tbill RWA exposures
Each of the above represent multi-billion capacity opportunities with that will now sit alongside the existing USDe collateral base to improve the product resilience through the cycle.
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USDe reserves are evolving: reducing concentration and building resilience across market cycles with a diversified collateral base.
Four additions to the collateral backing are detailed below for consideration by the risk committee, each a natural extension of existing Ethena allocations:
→ Overcollateralised institutional lending
→ High quality liquid RWAs beyond TBills
→ Equity & commodity basis exposure
→ Prime lending
Read more below on proposed updates:
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Ethena has no ADL "deals". Never has. ADL risk has been in the risk section of our docs since day one:
ADL implementation varies by exchange, but generally follow a similar waterfall of applying ADL to accounts with the:
i) highest leverage
ii) highest roe/ unrealised pnl
In contrast to others, Ethena sweeps pnl daily and runs zero leverage.
It is therefore considered one of the lowest risk accounts on the exchange and sits at the bottom of the ADL waterfall as a result.
As far as we are aware, there have not been any ADLs on BTC or ETH on the venues Ethena executes since 2018 on OKX. The vast majority of the backing sits in BTC and ETH on venues with a 8yr+ track record of not applying ADL to these assets, including on 10/10.
Ethena has no special ADL deals, just basic risk management.
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With all respect to Star, this story is candidly ridiculous.
Star is trying to claim that the root cause of 10/10 was Binance creating an Ethena yield campaign, causing USDe to get overleveraged from traders looping it on Binance, which eventually unwound because of a small price move.
The problems with this story:
1) The timing of this story doesn't line up. BTC bottomed a full 30 minutes before USDe price was affected on Binance. So USDe clearly can't have *caused* the liquidation cascade. This is clearly misplacing cause and effect.
2) USDe price diverged ONLY on Binance, it did not diverge on other venues. But the liquidation spiral was happening everywhere. So if the USDe "depeg" did not propagate across the market, it can't explain how *every single exchange* saw huge wipeouts. This is very much unlike Terra, which depegged everywhere and caused the same damage across every venue.
So maybe you could hedge Star's argument by saying "OK, maybe Ethena didn't *cause* 10/10, but it amplified it." But even as an amplifier, USDe fails the test because it didn't propagate cross-exchange. We know what a good explanation of a crash looks like—Terra, 3AC, FTX, all had global balance sheet effects that were felt everywhere. USDe did not do that, it was a Binance order book isolated event.
3) This begs the question: why is Star "revealing" this now, months later? Star does not produce any new evidence for this theory that people didn't already know and analyze to death. All of the order book data has been public for 4+ months and suddenly he claims this? This feels more like Star is picking a fight with CZ and using this simple story as a pretext to make it sound like CZ was in on it, or caused 10/10 through his own irresponsibility.
Look, the reality is, there's no simple story explaining 10/10 that survives scrutiny. I don't have one either. If there was a simple story that could explain 10/10, there would already be widespread agreement about what caused it, like the agreement around the 3AC or FTX crashes.
The best story to explain 10/10 is, to my mind:
* Trump spooked markets with tariff threats on a Friday evening
* This caused markets to sell off dramatically because crypto was the only thing to trade
* Flurry of activity caused Binance APIs to go down, causing huge price dislocations and preventing market makers from balancing inventory across exchanges. This caused huge liquidations that could not get filled, but liquidation engines keep firing regardless, and all this got amplified by ADLs initiating everywhere and breaking hedges and risk management
* This caused MMs to get wiped out, and they were unable to pick up the pieces—MMs need APIs to rebalance inventory, and without MMs, there were no buyers of last resort for many alts. Retail was not going to step in on a chaotic Friday evening to buy stuff
* Crypto liquidation mechanisms are not designed to be self-stabilizing the way that TradFi mechanisms are (circuit breakers, etc.), crypto liquidations are designed purely to minimize insolvency risk
* Altcoin prices are extremely path dependent, and we ended up in a bad path
That's my story. It's not a very satisfying one, but neither is this "Binance + Ethena did it" story. A better root cause explanation is "APIs went down at the worst possible time," but that doesn't really sound so dastardly.
Where simple stories do not suffice, unfortunately you have to choose a complicated one. And I think this complicated story is the best one for what actually happened on 10/10. Thankfully, the history of crypto is a long series of these "bad things happened, and later the market recovered."
In the long run, I'm not worried that 10/10 permanently broke the market. Just that prices are path-dependent, retail + MMs got hurt bad on 10/10, and will need time to recover.
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