Standard Chartered has started coverage of Ethena with a $2 price target for the ENA governance token by the end of 2028, a projection that would represent about 669% upside from ENA’s $0.26 trading price on Wednesday.
The bank’s case rests on projected growth in USDe, Ethena’s synthetic dollar, and a recently approved mechanism that directs protocol revenue toward ENA purchases. Standard Chartered expects USDe supply to rise from roughly $4.9 billion to about $40 billion by the end of 2028, an increase of more than eightfold.
Under Ethena’s fee-switch framework, 95% of net revenue generated by businesses using the Ethena brand is allocated to programmatic ENA buybacks. Standard Chartered said the scale of those repurchases could materially change the token’s supply-and-demand balance if USDe reaches its projected size.
The bank calculated that, with USDe at $40 billion and ENA remaining at its current price, annualized buybacks would equal roughly 23% of ENA’s circulating market value. That estimate puts the value of the fee switch largely in its ability to turn growth in stablecoin supply and protocol revenue into recurring spot-market demand for ENA.
USDe growth underpins the valuation case
Standard Chartered ranked Ethena as the fourth-largest stablecoin issuer, behind Tether, Circle, and Sky. It also placed Ethena second among issuers of yield-bearing stablecoins, behind Sky.
That category remains small compared with the overall stablecoin market. Yield-bearing stablecoins account for about 5% of stablecoin supply today, according to Standard Chartered, leaving Ethena’s forecast dependent on the category winning a larger share of on-chain dollar demand.
USDe differs from reserve-backed stablecoins that primarily hold cash equivalents such as Treasury bills. Ethena has historically generated yield through a cash-and-carry approach in crypto markets: holding spot assets while taking corresponding short positions in perpetual futures. The structure aims to capture funding rates and derivatives-market spreads while keeping the protocol’s overall crypto price exposure hedged.
Standard Chartered noted that returns from crypto basis trading have declined, pushing Ethena to seek a wider set of yield sources. The bank identified real-world assets, decentralized-finance lending, institutional lending, liquid stablecoins, and basis trades linked to equities and commodities as potential inputs for USDe returns.
The diversification effort addresses one of the more persistent questions surrounding synthetic dollars: whether their yields can remain durable when crypto derivatives markets become less profitable. A stablecoin offering attractive returns can grow rapidly during favorable market conditions, but a model tied too heavily to one trading strategy can face pressure when spreads narrow.
Ethena’s approach increasingly depends on building a portfolio of assets and hedges that can produce income across different market environments. Standard Chartered’s $40 billion USDe forecast assumes those newer sources can supplement, rather than merely replace, declining crypto-basis income.
Tokenized equities add another source of collateral
Ethena has also expanded its model into tokenized equities through Binance’s bStocks initiative, according to Standard Chartered. The arrangement uses tokenized equities as spot backing for USDe while Binance equity perpetuals are used to hedge the price exposure associated with those assets.
The structure applies Ethena’s existing synthetic-dollar model to stock-linked instruments. Rather than relying solely on crypto assets and crypto perpetuals, it could connect USDe’s collateral base to tokenized representations of equities and corresponding derivatives markets.
That expansion fits Standard Chartered’s broader expectation for tokenized assets. The bank forecasts that tokenized assets, including stablecoins and other real-world assets, could reach $4 trillion by the end of 2028, up from about $350 billion today.
Ethena would not need to capture a dominant share of that projected market to support its USDe forecast. Yet the bank’s assumptions place considerable weight on tokenized real-world assets becoming sufficiently liquid, accessible, and profitable to support stablecoin collateral and yield strategies at scale.
Fee switch turns revenue into ENA demand
Ethena’s fee switch passed with 100% of votes cast, authorizing the allocation of 95% of net revenue to ENA buybacks. Governance tokens often derive value from voting rights or prospective revenue claims, but the mechanism gives ENA a more direct connection to the protocol’s economic activity.
The design also creates a feedback loop. Greater USDe supply could produce more revenue; higher revenue would fund larger ENA buybacks; and those buybacks would remove ENA from the open market if the purchased tokens are retired or otherwise taken out of circulation under the program’s rules.
Standard Chartered compared the potential buyback intensity with Uniswap’s fee-switch model, saying an annualized buyback rate near 23% of ENA’s circulating value would be substantially larger than the roughly 3% to 4% rate it cited for UNI after Uniswap activated its own fee switch in December 2025.
That comparison illustrates why the bank’s target is unusually sensitive to execution. ENA’s outlook in this model depends less on a simple re-rating of governance tokens and more on whether Ethena can grow a revenue-producing stablecoin balance sheet without sacrificing the risk controls required to maintain USDe’s dollar peg.
Growth risks remain substantial
Standard Chartered identified slower-than-expected adoption of yield-bearing stablecoins as the main risk to its forecast. The category’s current 5% share of the stablecoin market means Ethena’s growth assumptions require a meaningful shift in user demand toward products that distribute or generate yield.
The bank also cited weaker growth in tokenized real-world assets as a risk, given Ethena’s intention to use those assets among the sources of yield supporting USDe. If tokenized securities, funds, commodities, or lending products remain limited in scale or liquidity, Ethena would have fewer options for diversifying beyond crypto derivatives.
Near-term ENA trading could also face supply pressure from an October 2 token unlock expected to release 40.6 million ENA, valued at about $10.3 million at the stated market price. Such events can increase the number of tokens available for sale, particularly when recipients choose to realize gains or rebalance holdings.
Standard Chartered’s 2028 target therefore represents a high-conviction scenario built on three linked outcomes: USDe expanding toward $40 billion, Ethena finding durable yield beyond crypto basis trades, and fee-switch buybacks translating protocol revenue into sustained demand for ENA.
Explore how tokenized assets and RWAs shape ENA’s outlook in 2028—read our tokenized equities guide next.
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