Standard Chartered expects Ethena’s ENA token to reach $2 by the end of 2028, arguing that buybacks funded by the protocol’s revenue will force the price higher as its USDe synthetic dollar grows.

The bank initiated coverage of ENA in a research report on Wednesday from Geoff Kendrick, its global head of digital assets research. It forecasts ENA at $0.42 at the end of 2026 and $1.10 at the end of 2027, and said the path to $2 implies a gain of roughly 7x from the report’s reference price of $0.28, outpacing its own forecasts for bitcoin and ether. ENA traded near $0.25 on Wednesday.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

Buybacks at the Center

The call rests on the fee switch ENA holders approved on Sept. 8, which sends 95% of net revenue from Ethena’s business lines to buying back ENA. The share of revenue set aside grows as USDe supply rises, and the schedule takes nothing until supply reaches $7.5 billion, according to a Risk Committee analysis posted with the proposal. USDe supply is about $4.9 billion.

Kendrick estimates USDe could reach $40 billion by the end of 2028. At that size, with ENA’s price unchanged, the bank calculated that buybacks would retire around 23% of tokens a year. It said “a 23% buyback would be far too high,” so it expects the price to rise until the buyback share settles at a sustainable level.

The bank’s model is Uniswap, whose annualized buyback rate settled at around 3% to 4% after its fee switch went live in December 2025, as UNI’s price roughly tripled from when the bank began covering it in June. At that rate, $40 billion of USDe would require about a 7x move in ENA, the report said.

Beyond the Basis Trade

By market cap, only Tether, Circle and Sky issue more stablecoins than Ethena, according to the report, and USDe reached a $10 billion market cap faster than any other stablecoin after its late-2023 launch. Its yield first came from the crypto basis trade. As those returns shrank, USDe supply fell, and Ethena has since added lending, real-world assets and tokenized equity basis trades to its backing. The bank said it views the broader collateral base “as highly sustainable.”

The report also noted that the Ethena Foundation bought out locked tokens from major seed investors in August. From Oct. 5, only tokens held by the foundation or Ethena Labs employees, 12% of the total, will continue vesting.

The main risk to the forecast is slower-than-expected growth in yield-bearing stablecoins, which make up about 5% of the stablecoin market, the bank said. A second risk is that tokenized real-world assets do not scale as it expects.

Related Listen: Guy Young on Why Ethena Launched a Neobank on Top of Its Stablecoin