Ethena aims to decouple from Bitcoin price fluctuations, says founder

Ethena Labs founder Guy Young wants to do something most crypto projects treat as heresy: build a business that doesn't live and die by Bitcoin's mood swings.

The protocol behind the synthetic dollar USDe is actively restructuring its revenue model to reduce exposure to the crypto market's most familiar gravitational force, shifting toward tokenized real-world assets and diversified yield sources that can generate returns regardless of where BTC trades.

Ethena's core product, USDe, launched publicly in February 2024 with a clever but inherently crypto-dependent mechanism. The protocol pairs spot crypto collateral, think staked Ethereum or Bitcoin, with short positions in perpetual futures contracts. The long and short sides cancel each other out (that's the "delta-neutral" part), while the protocol captures funding rates and staking rewards as yield.

When the market is bullish and leverage-hungry traders are paying premiums to go long, those funding rates can be generous. When sentiment flips, the math gets less friendly.

This is precisely the dependency Young is trying to break. If your entire revenue engine runs on crypto derivatives markets, your business cycle mirrors crypto's boom-bust rhythm almost perfectly. For a protocol trying to offer a stable dollar product, that's a structural tension worth resolving.