The Ethena Foundation bought out the locked ENA held by early investors who had been selling it and put a fee switch funding ENA buybacks to a tokenholder vote on Thursday, addressing what Ethena itself named as the two standing doubts about the project. ENA rose about 16% in the hours after the announcement, to around $0.17, extending a weeklong rally that had already lifted the token about 70%.

The purchases ran over the counter across the past two weeks and covered investors originally allocated more than 0.25% of supply who sold any ENA after the October 10, 2025 market peak. One wallet declined, the Foundation said, citing its continued conviction in Ethena. Investors who had not sold were offered a repurchase at par, and the Foundation said in the announcement, “Not a single investor agreed.” The remaining investors’ tokens unlock in one batch on October 5, ending the monthly unlock schedule, while team tokens keep their original vesting. Ethena published the wallets but not the stake sizes or the prices paid. StablecoinX, a digital-asset treasury company, still holds about 20% of supply under a lockup set out in its SEC filings, according to the announcement.

The Buyback Has a Trigger

Ethena’s announcement describes the fee switch as using “95% net revenue accrued across all business lines” to buy back ENA. The two numbers sit at different layers. The milestone schedule governs how much protocol revenue is diverted, 5% once USDe circulating supply reaches $7.5 billion, stepping up to 25% above $25 billion, while Ethena says 95% of the net revenue paid to the Foundation goes to the buybacks and the rest funds growth. The proposal’s illustrative table puts the first rung at $22.5 million a year without spelling out whether that figure already reflects the Foundation’s retained share. USDe supply is about $4.04 billion, down roughly 73% from its peak of nearly $15 billion in October 2025.

Blockworks Advisory, which sits on Ethena’s Risk Committee, backtested the design across 705 days and supports it, but put the arithmetic plainly: “At today’s USDe supply of $4.07B the schedule takes nothing, so nothing in this document is immediate.”

Who Pays for It

The take, Blockworks Advisory wrote in its analysis, “comes off gross protocol revenue and is split pro rata across everything that revenue funds,” so switching it on would cut the sUSDe staking distribution and Ethena’s partner and Aave reward lines by the same rate. On the past month’s payout mix, the firm put a 5% take’s cost at about $8.8 million a year.

The schedule replaces parameters the Risk Committee set in 2024, which required $6 billion of USDe supply and $250 million of cumulative revenue and ranked reserve fund capitalization ahead of any payout. It “contains no Reserve Fund term and no competitiveness condition,” Blockworks Advisory wrote, though it added that the reserve has drawn no allocation since December 2024. The 2024 framework also pointed revenue at sENA, the staked token; this one buys on the open market instead.

Voting closes September 2. Ethena said its Master Framework Agreement with Ethena Labs, assigning protocol IP and economic upside to the Foundation rather than Labs equity holders, is an agreement in principle it expects to publish in October, and it filed with the Blockworks Token Transparency Framework, where the submission is marked partial with six gaps.

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