There are too many VCs and KOLs who are supporting ENA/USDe (as far as I know, none of them publicly said they were paid to promote), so I decided to stand up and expose some lies to help everyone see the truth. I post this to remind everyone, I hope you don’t be fooled into investing in this scam that is doomed to fail. I also recorded a lot of links to scam marketing for your reference.
It seems that many KOLs and the Ethena team either don’t understand what derivatives are or are deliberately misleading everyone. To be honest, I don’t know which is worse. Let me first talk about the basics: if I short X/Y perpetual contract with A as collateral on CEX, then I am long A, short X, and long Y at the same time. Therefore, when Ethena holds stETH on Binance and shorts ETH/USDT perpetual contract, they are actually long stETH, short ETH, and long USDT. Yes, please read it carefully again - Ethena is long USDT perpetual contract. Their risk document does not mention this at all, but they promote themselves as completely different and better than USDT. In fact, holding USDT itself is much more reliable than long USDT perpetual contract on CEX.
In fact, about 31% of the funds supporting USDe are USDC and USDS, and the rest are perpetual hedging positions in BTC and ETH/stETH. As shown in the attachment, most of the open interest of perpetual contracts is on USDT pairs, which means that Ethena holds a large number of USDT longs.
In other words, USDDe is a stablecoin basket consisting of USDT perpetual contract longs, USDC and USDS. To be honest, anyone can hold stablecoins directly without having to engage in USDT perpetual contract longs.
“USTb is a game-changer.” Do you really think a company like BlackRock will work with a team like Ethena that is full of tricks for a long time? BlackRock is more likely to launch its own stablecoin and directly try to replace Tether.
USDe has a big design flaw that will eventually fail. I am not the only one who knows about this problem, just the only one who dares to speak out publicly. The Ethena team previously refused to donate $1 million to public utilities (Tornado Cash defense, Ethereum developers and zachxbt), even though they have $47 million in reserves and don't care about using this money to protect $2.5 billion in assets.
https://x.com/TardFiWhale/status/1784919255638511737…
The chart shows that TVL is down while the open interest weighted funding rate for BTC perpetual contracts on Binance is back to previous highs. Make no mistake, this is not a sign of adoption, but smart investors have figured out the issues I was shouting about months ago.
These KOLs and VCs promoting products are like pushing retail investors into the fire pit. They are part of the problem and the reason why Murad is getting more and more attention. I hope everyone will be more vigilant about these KOLs and VCs promoting Ethena. The irony is that many people demand higher standards from Murad and Ansem, but have no problem with lower standards for themselves.
Disclaimer: I don't hold ENA or USDe, and I don't know if ENA will rise in the short term - it may, but you have to understand that its fundamentals have collapsed long ago. I would rather jump off a cliff with Murad than touch this kind of junk project, so as not to be harvested by those insiders.
Ethena's largest stablecoin holding wallet: https://debank.com/profile/0x2d4d2a025b10c09bdbd794b4fce4f7ea8c7d7bb4…
Ethena Reserve Fund: https://debank.com/profile/0x2b5ab59163a6e93b4486f6055d33ca4a115dd4d5
