Ethena's December 2025 Governance Update

LlamaRisk
Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:25:31 +0000
General

Ethena’s December 2025 Governance Update

Welcome to the latest installment of Ethena’s monthly governance update, covering all major developments in December 2025. This report highlights significant protocol developments, key risk metrics, major ecosystem expansions including the launch of HyENA and a new custodial partnership.

Key Takeaways

Ecosystem Expansion: Ethena announced HyENA, a new USDe-margined perpetuals DEX built on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 platform. This integration allows users to earn rewards on collateral while trading, capturing economics previously internalized by stablecoin issuers.

Custodial Diversification: The protocol has officially onboarded Anchorage Digital Bank as a custodian for USDe backing assets. As the first federally chartered crypto-native bank in the U.S., this partnership significantly strengthens the protocol’s regulatory and operational robustness.

Reserve Fund Strength: The Reserve Fund stands at $62.09 million. The analysis using both Conservative and Moderate methodologies confirms the fund is adequate, with the current size exceeding the recommended coverage for potential drawdowns.

Protocol Solvency: The protocol remains over-collateralized with a solvency ratio of 101.1%, providing a healthy buffer above the 100% threshold.

Yield Competitiveness: Despite broader market conditions, sUSDe continues to offer superior yield opportunities with an APY of 5.1%, outperforming other major stablecoin savings rates like the USDS savings rate (4%) and Aave USDC lending rate (3.11%).

Protocol & Risk Metrics

Supply and Yield:

USDe: The total supply of USDe closed the month at $6.304 billion.

sUSDe: The supply of staked USDe (sUSDe) is 3.482 billion, resulting in a staking ratio of 55.25%.

Protocol Yield: The sUSDe APY is currently 5.1%, continuing to offer a competitive yield.

Source: Ethena Risk Portal, January 2nd, 2026

Source: Ethena Risk Portal, January 2nd, 2026

Liquidity & Redemptions:
The protocol maintains healthy liquidity depth across Curve, Uniswap, and other venues, with $82M of non-USDe liquidity. Furthermore, minting events continue to outpace redemptions, with stable USDT/USDC balances available for immediate redemption, around the $30M mark.

Source: Entropy Advisors / Dune, January 2nd, 2026

Source: Ethena Risk Portal, January 2nd, 2026

Risk & Resilience Metrics:

Solvency: The protocol’s solvency remains healthy at 101.1%. This indicates that the value of backing assets exceeds the outstanding USDe liability by a comfortable margin.

Reserve Fund: The Reserve Fund capitalization is $62.09 million. Latest analysis confirms this amount is sufficient to cover potential drawdowns under current market conditions.

Collateral Composition: The protocol maintains a diversified collateral base. As seen in the breakdown, significant allocations include: $958.5M in BTC (Binance), $403.5M in BTC (Unallocated), and $383.9M in ETH (Binance), among others.

Source: Ethena Risk Portal, January 2nd, 2026

Ecosystem Expansion & Integrations

December saw two major announcements that fundamentally improved the utility of the Ethena ecosystem.

USDe-Margined Perps on Hyperliquid
Ethena has introduced HyENA, a USDe-margined perpetuals DEX on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 platform. HyENA combines the high performance of Hyperliquid with USDe as trading collateral.

Economic Shift: Historically, collateral on exchanges (USDT/USDC) generated no yield for the trader. HyENA changes this by allowing users to earn rewards on their USDe margin while trading.

Revenue: 45% of trading fees on HyENA are directed to the Ethena ecosystem.

Cost Efficiency: Using USDe as margin can significantly offset funding costs.

New Custodian: Anchorage Digital Bank
Ethena has onboarded Anchorage Digital Bank as a supporting custodian for USDe backing assets, joining Copper and Ceffu.

Regulatory Status: Anchorage is America’s first federally chartered crypto-native bank, operating under strict oversight via the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Transparency: Beginning in January 2026, Anchorage will provide monthly signed Custodian Attestations.

Operational Efficiency: The integration supports 24/7/365 minting and redemption workflows.

Collateral & DeFi Footprint

Ethena’s assets continue to serve as a major collateral type across lending markets.

Aave Core Instance:
Ethena assets are actively used as collateral on Aave v3 Ethereum Core market:

USDe: $804.22M supplied

sUSDe: $656.81M supplied.

PT sUSDe Feb 2026: $321.27M supplied.

PT USDe Feb 2026: $132.73M supplied.

Aave Plasma Market:
Significant assets are also present in the Plasma Market instance:

PT sUSDe Jan 2026: $814.26M supplied.

USDe: $355.05M supplied.

sUSDe: $257.20M supplied.

PT USDe Jan 2026: $120.63M supplied.

Pendle Markets:
Yield trading remains a strong use case, with significant TVL across multiple maturities, both on Ethereum and on Plasma:

sUSDe 15 Jan 2026: $827.36M TVL (5.33% Fixed APY)

sUSDe 05 Feb 2026: $451.06M TVL (5.17% Fixed APY)

sUSDe 09 Apr 2026: $38.93M TVL (6.67% Fixed APY)

USDe 05 Feb 2026: $195.39M TVL (4.71% Fixed APY)

USDe 15 Jan 2026: $168.54M TVL (4.44% Fixed APY)

USDe 09 Apr 2026: $23.62M TVL (5.66% Fixed APY)

Governance Activity

Publication of MiCAR-Compliant White Paper:
The Ethena Foundation has published a MiCAR-compliant white paper for the ENA token. This is a critical step in ensuring regulatory alignment with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR), paving the way for continued compliant operations and token usage within the region.

Reserve Fund Subcommittee Update:
While the Reserve Fund Subcommittee published the November update in early December, we are now sharing the newly updated reserve fund parameters as of the end of December to reflect the most current risk landscape.

Current Fund Size: $62.09 Million, USDtb ($42.05M) and USDtb-USDC LP ($20.02M).

Conservative Recommendation: The model recommends a buffer of $22 Million.

Moderate Recommendation: The model recommends $17 Million.

In the images below we share these current most up-to-date recommendations for the reserve fund.

Source: LlamaRisk Reserve Fund Portal, January 2nd, 2026

Source: LlamaRisk Reserve Fund Portal, January 2nd, 2026

Source: LlamaRisk Reserve Fund Portal, January 2nd, 2026

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