In mid-December, Ethena's USDtb was officially launched. This is a new stable currency with BlackRock's "BUIDL" tokenized fund as its reserve asset. Before participating, first understand the basic information, risks, and benefits of USDtb. !
According to Ethena’s announcement published on the Mirror platform and the link page attached to the announcement, we can learn the following information:
1.Ethena hopes to use USDtb as a reserve asset (alternative asset) for USDe
We know that USDe obtains funding rate income through hedging positions of spot + contract. However, in a market environment with negative funding rates, it will be difficult to obtain positive sources of income.
In response to this, Ethena proposed USDtb as a response to this problem in the governance forum at the end of November. When encountering extreme market conditions in the future, Ethena will convert USDe into USDtb to solve the financial stability problem of insufficient income.
2.USDtb is issued by the independent company Pallas
Although external promotional documents and news media all state that Ethena is the issuer of USDtb. In fact, a thorough reading of the USDtb documents reveals that the actual issuing institution of USDtb is a company called Pallas (BVI) Ltd.. The only director and shareholder of the company is the Pallas Foundation, which is responsible for the issuance of USDtb. Redemption procedures.
So you ask me where Ethena went?
According to the description of the document, to be precise, Ethena is a so-called "partner".
Specifically, Ethena provides investment management services as a company called Athene.
You may have doubts here, why is it so complicated?
Simply put,
The advantage is: when Ethena encounters extreme problems and goes bankrupt, USDtb will not be affected.
The disadvantage is (I think the possible disadvantage): when there is a serious problem with USDtb, the legal responsibility may fall on Pallas. However, the known information about this company still needs to be supplemented by Ethena, so I think this may be a potential risk.
3. Four custodians and four audit institutions
According to Ethena's Mirror article announcement, USDtb's cooperative custodians include the following four: Copper, Zodia, Komainu, and Coinbase Web3 wallet.
Although you actually go to the transparency information page of USDtb, you can see that there is a 100% reserve (supply: 89.36M, backing: 89.40M).
However, the current actual situation is that only Komianu and Coinbase perform custody services, so this part remains to be observed and tracked.
As for the audit report, it is also the basic institutional audit + audit bounty platform Code4rena. Those who are interested in this part can check the original report by themselves.
4.USDtb income opportunities
According to the announcement document and Ethena web page information, currently USDtb only integrates Curve’s two LP pools to provide user participation: USDtb/USDC and USDtb/USDe. Among them, only USDtb/USDe provides Ethena’s 30x airdrop points.
If there are other income opportunities, friends are welcome to leave a message below to add them to me.
Summarize
Based on the current information and situation, I think the launch of USDtb is more beneficial to the Ethena protocol itself, because it enhances Ethena's profitability and risk tolerance. Through the dual stablecoin model of USDe and USDtb, the Ethena protocol can have room to generate profits during both bull and bear periods.
For users, to be honest, I don’t see the appeal of USDtb yet. Of course, as a newly launched stablecoin asset, we must give it time to grow, so we can pay close attention to what kind of revenue multiplication effect Ethena will provide USDtb.
Drawing on the experience of USDe, everyone can pay attention to the future integration of USDtb into the defi protocol and the amount of airdrop bonus points provided, as well as whether CEX will include USDtb as a margin for derivatives, etc.
"Let the bullets fly for a while", I think, wait until USDtb has more complete application scenarios, and then consider whether to use USDtb!
If you have any questions, please leave a message and discuss below. Partners are also welcome to add information that I have not seen!
You can also leave a message to see what projects I analyze. Last time, a friend mentioned Puffer. I will check it out in a few days.
In addition, Ethena’s airdrop points period this season has passed almost halfway (ends in March next year). It is recommended that everyone can start to redeploy funds on Ethena and leave some positions to avoid airdrop rules requiring relevant positions.
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※Partners who want to participate in Ethena Season 3 activities to earn ENA airdrops can use my code:
eu54u
※None of the above content constitutes investment advice. Users are advised to operate according to their own risk tolerance and DYOR participate in the investment market with caution.
※The attached picture is taken from the Ethena announcement and Curve dapp