Seraphim, head of the growth department of Ethena Labs, the development company of the stablecoin protocol Ethena, mentioned on the community platform X on Sunday the recent progress of the protocol, including the proposal to use Solana’s native token SOL as collateral for the USDe stablecoin, the launch of a new stablecoin UStb in collaboration with Securitize and BlackRock, over $3 million in cross-chain deployment, and the promotion of CeFi (centralized finance) to cover one billion users.
A proposal at the Ethena governance forum suggested adding SOL as a supported asset for USDe in a controlled and planned manner, using a mechanism similar to the current perpetual contracts hedging mechanism for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). Additionally, the proposal suggested considering BNSOL (Binance liquidity staking SOL) and bbSOL (Bybit liquidity staking SOL) as additional supported assets for USDe.
The proposal pointed out that there is approximately $2 billion in open contracts for SOL on the platforms where Ethena currently executes hedging trades, along with funding rates that have been more favorable than BTC and ETH since 2024. This presents an attractive opportunity for Ethena and USDe to further collaborate with one of the largest ecosystems in the crypto space and potentially increase protocol revenue as market conditions improve.
The author of the proposal believes that, in addition to potentially increasing protocol revenue through SOL funding rates, this move will release an additional $20 to $30 billion in open interest, allowing Ethena to continue to expand on the current supply of USDe of approximately $2.5 billion and keep up with any potential growth in market demand.
Related articles: “What is Ethena? A five-minute tutorial to understand the stablecoin USDe and Ethena” and “Market funding rates turn negative! Stablecoin protocol Ethena goes from profit to loss, facing its biggest challenge since launch”.