Ethena’s Governance Token ENA Soars 60% Over Last 7 Days

Two recent updates—one involving SOL as a potential backing asset for USDe and the other about a large planned investment in real-word asset products—appear to be behind the rise. 

Synthetic dollar provider Ethena has seen its governance token soar in the last seven days, amidst the announcement of several well-received updates to the protocol. 

ENA has increased nearly 60% from 28.5 cents on Oct. 9 to 45.6 cents early Tuesday, data from CoinGecko shows. ENA has been one of the best performers among cryptocurrencies over that time period, with BTC and SOL only rising about 7% each over the last seven days.

ENA’s latest news includes governance members considering a proposal to onboard SOL as a backing asset for USDe, Ethena’s synthetic dollar. In addition, Ethena Labs announced on Oct. 10 that the protocol plans to invest its backup fund, which is worth about $46 million, into four real-world asset products: BlackRock and Securitize’s BUIDL, Sky’s USDS, Mountain’s USDM, and Superstate’s USTB. 

Read More: What Is Ethena’s USDe Synethic Dollar? A Beginner’s Guide

The number of ENA tokens sitting on all exchanges such as Binance has increased about 7.7% from around 606 million tokens on Oct. 8 to nearly 653 million at presstime, according to blockchain analytics firm Nansen. The increased number of tokens on exchanges shows that more trading is being done using ENA. Specifically, in the last seven days, Binance has seen the largest influx among all exchanges with $16.3 million in ENA tokens, but Uniswap has seen the largest reduction of ENA tokens, with the exchange’s balance decreasing by over $1 million worth of ENA tokens. 

Ethena is the 10th largest protocol in the decentralized finance ecosystem with a total value locked of $2.43 billion, per DefiLlama. 

As for how ENA is used in Ethena’s governance process, the protocol’s document states that “tokenholders are able to delegate everyday decision-making with respect to key aspects of the ecosystem to sophisticated, expert-level stakeholders—most of whom provide advisory and similar services to other projects and protocols in the industry—while retaining transparency during the process.”