Ethena Pay, the consumer money app that Ethena Labs launched on Sept. 1, now expects to begin opening in the US, the UK and Europe in about three to four weeks, founder and CEO Guy Young said.

Opening those markets is the team’s top priority, Young said on Unchained in a livestream interview recorded Sept. 14, naming the US, Europe, the UK and parts of Asia including Taiwan. He said it would “be a matter of weeks of sort of like three to four weeks until a lot of these new geographies are coming online.”

That window runs later than Ethena’s earlier target. In a Sept. 3 blog post, the company listed US and EU support among the features it said were coming in September. The app’s jurisdictions page lists the US, the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea as coming soon, without dates.

Card Partners Set the Pace

Young said the timing depends in part on the companies that issue and run the app’s Visa card, and that Ethena is constrained by “the timelines that they’re able to bring our product to those markets.” The card, issued by Third National and managed by Rain, is currently not available to US citizens, residents or other US persons, according to its terms.

Ethena, which issues the synthetic dollar USDe, has pitched the app as a way to reach users directly rather than through exchanges.

Where Ethena’s Users Are

Young said the US is not among his priority markets for the app. “I wouldn’t say it’s like even a top five sort of priority market for us just in terms of where we think the end state of this product can go,” he said. South America and Asia, he said, are where most of Ethena’s users already are.

The app remains in a gated beta, which Young said is deliberate because “we wanna do things in a slow and controlled way.”

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