Risk Committee Election Application: OAK Research
To Ethena’s stakeholders and the broader community, OAK Research is presenting its application to join Ethena’s Risk Committee with the objective of serving as an independent risk intelligence layer, community liaison, and ENA-aligned member.
Our proposal focuses on three core pillars we intend to contribute to: Risk assessments, Transparency improvement, ENA-focused evolution of the protocol.
About OAK Research, nominated members, and Ethena alignment
OAK Research, launched in November 2024, is an independent research platform dedicated to the analysis of digital asset market, on-chain finance, stablecoins, RWAs, and broader crypto market developments. Its mission is to provide investors and market participants with clear, data-driven reports and analyses.
Our Research has been covering Ethena for over a year with a total of 9 Ethena-focused articles and 14 articles in total that mention Ethena, or its ecosystem, some of which you can find at the end of this proposal.
Artem Sinyakin will be the individual primarily responsible for attending Risk Committee meetings, representing OAK during deliberations, coordinating internal research and remaining accountable for OAK’s votes and deliverables.
Artem has worked in the digital asset industry for more than six years across blockchain infrastructure, node operations, crypto media, protocol research and business development. His principal research areas include Ethereum DeFi, stablecoins, yield-bearing assets and protocol economics.
He will be supported by YetAnotherAnon, OAK Research’s quantitative and technical research lead. YetAnotherAnon specialises in DeFi market microstructure, protocol design, liquidity analysis and the quantitative assessment of yield-generating mechanisms. His work focuses on identifying the assumptions, dependencies and tail risks behind financial protocols rather than evaluating them solely through headline yield or historical averages.
YetAnotherAnon operates publicly under a pseudonym. His legal identity can be disclosed privately for any applicable KYC, KYB or background-screening requirements.
The wider OAK Research team will contribute peer review, data verification, editorial review and technical support.
- Applying entity: OAK INVEST SAS, operating as OAK Research
- Jurisdiction: France
- Primary representative: Artem Sinyakin, co-founder and CEO
- Technical and quantitative lead: YetAnotherAnon
OAK Research has conducted research across lending markets, stablecoins, interoperability infrastructure, derivatives, real-world assets and protocol economics. This experience gives our team a broad view of the dependencies that can emerge when multiple protocols, counterparties and collateral types become components of the same financial system.
Contribution: The Three Pillars of Focus
1 - Risk assessment and broad contribution to Ethena’s backing and integrations
Ethena’s Risk Committee is responsible for evaluating areas including backing assets, hedging venues, custodians, revenue allocation, and risk limits.
Ethena’s backing model has become considerably more diversified and operationally complex. Risk must now be evaluated across DeFi lending, liquid stablecoins, institutional lending, RWAs, custodians, whitelabel stablecoins, cross-chain deployments, and the remaining crypto-basis portfolio that might evolve with the market conditions.
OAK will conduct independent assessments of material backing assets, integrations, counterparties and capital-allocation proposals presented to the Risk Committee. These may include:
- Liquidity and redemption capacity.
- Concentration by asset, issuer, counterparty, custodian, venue and chain.
- Correlation and shared dependencies between separate exposures.
- Credit, counterparty and operational risk.
- Available liquidity.
- Smart-contract, administrative and cross-chain dependencies.
- Money-market utilisation, collateral composition and liquidation exposure.
- Yield sustainability and the source of the return being generated.
- Reserve Fund analysis.
- Exit conditions and the time required to reduce or unwind an allocation.
- Stress scenarios involving concurrent redemptions, collateral impairment, infrastructure disruption or counterparty failure.
Each analysis and post will be backed by data, a report published and distributed by OAK Research on the governance forum and our socials and website contributing to Ethena’s awareness and growth.
2 - Community liaison & Transparency actor
The Risk Committee performs highly consequential work, but much of that work remains difficult for token holders to follow across individual proposals, dashboards, legal reviews, and monthly updates.
Besides the work on risk assessments, we believe that Ethena’s decision-making process, product launches, partnership agreements, and the overall governance structure could benefit from better coverage and follow-ups. Where we vote for or against a proposal, we will publish our reasoning in full and the conditions under which we would change position.
OAK Research would provide an independent accountability layer between Risk Committee decisions and ENA holders. In addition to explaining material decisions, we would track whether approved limits, reporting requirements and implementation conditions are subsequently respected.
Our responsibilities under this pillar will include:
- Publishing OAK’s reasoning when voting for or against material proposals.
- Maintaining a public tracker of material proposals, decisions, implementation conditions and reviews.
- Publishing views where OAK disagrees with the majority decision.
- Disclosing relevant conflicts and recusals.
- Producing accessible summaries that allow ENA holders to understand the trade-offs without removing the underlying technical detail.
Governance-forum publication will remain the primary channel for committee-related work. OAK Research’s website, newsletter and social channels will be used to extend the distribution of public information and direct more stakeholders towards the official governance process.
Public reporting will remain subject to confidentiality, legal and security considerations. OAK Research will not publish confidential committee information solely to generate content.
3 - ENA alignment
ENA alignment should not mean maximising the token’s short-term price at the expense of USDe’s competitiveness or the protocol’s solvency. This means making hard choices, explaining them through data and analysis, and stressing the value benefit for ENA.
We intend to bring back the discussions around the fee switch for ENA. OAK will continue updating its fee-switch models as Ethena’s revenue sources, backing composition, sUSDe benchmark yield, ENA liquidity, and token emissions evolve.
In March 2026 we published six modelled activation scenarios on this forum and concluded that conditions did not then justify activation: compressed sUSDe and sUSDS spreads, a reserve mechanism that cannot fill outside bull regimes, and emissions that dwarf any realistic buyback.
We are neither structurally opposed to nor automatically supportive of a fee switch at the moment. Our recommendation will depend on whether a proposed mechanism is economically material, sustainable across market regimes, and consistent with the continued growth of USDe.
By bringing this matter back on the table, we intend to accelerate the research around the various models and their implementation.
For OAK Research, ENA alignment means ensuring that token holders have:
- A clear understanding of how protocol revenue is generated.
- Transparency regarding how that revenue is allocated.
- Defensible activation and deactivation conditions for value-accrual mechanisms.
- An assessment of whether a proposed mechanism is economically material.
- Governance decisions that increase the protocol’s long-term resilience and strategic value.
Previous Involvement with Ethena
OAK Research has covered Ethena for more than a year.
We have published nine Ethena-focused articles and fourteen articles that analyse Ethena or its wider ecosystem. Our research has covered USDe and sUSDe, Ethena’s evolving backing model, Stablecoin-as-a-Service, HyENA, institutional distribution, protocol revenue allocation and the ENA fee switch.
OAK previously supported the launch and distribution of HyENA.
Besides this involvement, OAK Research has had a commercial agreement with Ethena for our research articles. This partnership ended in December 2025.
Why OAK Research
OAK Research applied for the previous Risk Committee term and was not selected.
Rather than ending our involvement after the election, we continued contributing independently without any commercial agreement with Ethena.
We published a detailed fee-switch model on the governance forum, continued monitoring Ethena’s changing collateral and revenue structure, covered the protocol’s expansion across Solana and institutional markets, and published a critical assessment of Ethena’s current product positioning.
We have a deep understanding of Ethena, where it is today, and where it is headed. By producing research material on the protocol, we believe that our contribution will allow us to steer the protocol in the right direction and provide more transparency on what the Risk Committee actually does.
OAK Research will allocate one executive liaison and one additional researcher to its Risk Committee responsibilities. The two people managing OAK’s role within this committee will be Artem (CEO and founder of the company) and YetAnotherAnon (quantitative & technical research lead). The wider OAK team will contribute peer review, data verification, editorial control, and technical support.
We published research that was supportive when Ethena’s strategy was compelling and critical when we believed market expectations or protocol priorities required reconsideration. We have combined protocol research with community distribution and have already invested considerable time in understanding Ethena’s mechanisms and evolution.
If you allocate your vote to OAK Research, you support unbiased analysis driven by data and research, you support an actor that is ready to make the hard choices for the long-term success of the protocol and ENA, you support an organisation that, despite losing the previous election, remained invested in Ethena’s success and direction, you support an independent bootstrapped company that does not have any other interests with protocols involved with USDe.
Selected work on Ethena:
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Ethena: A Deep Dive into the Ecosystem, a comprehensive assessment of Ethena’s products, competitive position, revenue model, and structural risks.
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Ethena Whitelabel: Ending the Stablecoin Value Leakage, examining Ethena’s Stablecoin-as-a-Service model and its implications for partner ecosystems.
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HyENA by Ethena: Bringing Yield-Bearing Collateral to Hyperliquid, analysing the mechanics and strategic implications of HyENA and HIP-3.
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Ethena: Why Activating the Fee Switch Now Would Be a Mistake, presenting a deliberately independent assessment of the risks associated with premature value distribution.
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Ethena’s Fee Switch: Our Models, Proposal and Doubts, modelling six potential fee-switch structures and evaluating their effect on sUSDe competitiveness, ENA buybacks, and protocol capital allocation. This analysis was also published directly on Ethena’s governance forum after OAK was not selected for the previous Risk Committee.
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Is Ethena’s Product-Market Fit Weakening?, an independent review of Ethena’s evolution from a crypto basis-trade product into a broader institutional stablecoin and collateral platform.
Six-month commitments
Here are our commitments for this term should our application gather enough support for our bid to win the election.
1 - Meeting participation: Artem will attend all scheduled Risk Committee meetings, prepare briefs for the entire OAK Research team, and work on the discussed topics to provide valuable feedback for the decision-making process.
2 - Community feedback implementation and transparency improvement. We truly believe that by providing more updates, constant follow-ups on previous decisions, and the decision-making rationale, we can improve the sentiment around Ethena and ENA.
3 - Decision rationales: Where permitted by confidentiality requirements, OAK will publish its reasoning for supporting, conditionally supporting, or opposing material proposals.
4 - Monthly reporting: OAK will publish a monthly Risk and Governance Brief covering material decisions, implementation progress, changes in exposure and unresolved risks. We will disclose the focus of our work through the month and allow the Ethena community and ENA holders to better understand the priorities for the protocol.
5 - Fee-switch research: OAK will publish an updated fee-switch assessment during the term following a material change in Ethena’s economics, revenue, industry benchmark, and new inititatives.
6 - Term-end accountability: OAK Research will publish a report comparing these commitments with the work actually completed at the end of the term. This report will include the results, the number of discussions and governance proposals, as well as our votes.
Conflicts of interest
At the time of this application, OAK Research has no active commercial research agreement with Ethena.
OAK Research does not currently hold an advisory position or governance role with a service provider, hedging venue, custodian or asset issuer directly responsible for USDe’s backing.
OAK nevertheless discloses the following relationships:
- OAK previously completed paid research and distribution work involving Ethena. This commercial relationship ended in December 2025.
- OAK previously supported the launch and distribution of HyENA.
- OAK currently has research or coverage agreements with Plasma, Maple and Pyth Network.
- OAK has a sponsorship agreement with Bybit EU covering the French market.
- OAK may continue conducting commercial research for digital asset organisations during the Risk Committee term.
OAK Research commits to maintaining the highest level of integrity and agrees to the following:
- All relationships relevant to a proposal will be disclosed before OAK participates in the corresponding deliberation.
- OAK will recuse itself where a commercial relationship could reasonably impair, or appear to impair, our independence.
- OAK will not accept a paid mandate from an organisation while leading an active Ethena assessment of that organisation.
- Commercial research and Risk Committee responsibilities will be operationally separated.
- Risk Committee access or confidential information will never be included in a commercial agreement.
- Confidential committee information will not be used for trading, commercial negotiations or publication.
- Critical findings will not be withheld because they concern a present or former commercial partner.
- Material disclosures and recusals will be documented publicly where confidentiality requirements permit.
