Ethena's Guy Young: Stablecoin Growth Needs Real-World Reach

Stablecoin infrastructure has quietly become one of the most important corners of the crypto market. Few founders have a bigger stake in that shift than Guy Young.

• USDe rocketed from zero to nearly $15 billion in assets within 18 months.
• Supply has since settled at $5.5 billion to $6 billion, still No. 2 behind Sky’s USDS.
• Ethena added real-world assets and institutional lending to diversify USDe’s reserves.

At Consensus Hong Kong 2026, the founder and CEO of Ethena Labs sat down with CoinShares’ The Node Magazine and lead content manager Jérémy Le Bescont. Young walked through how his synthetic dollar scaled so quickly, what nearly broke it, and where the category heads next.

Young said USDe, Ethena’s yield-bearing digital dollar, grew from zero to almost $15 billion in assets within its first 18 months. Supply has since settled between $5.5 billion and $6 billion. That’s still the second-largest crypto-backed dollar token behind Sky’s USDS, another stablecoin, according to CoinShares.

USDe works like a different kind of bank deposit, Young said. Users hand over collateral and earn a return generated by the underlying assets. Ethena keeps a smaller cut than rivals like Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, which Young said captures nearly all the yield on its own reserves.