Ethena (ENA), the protocol behind USDe, the $3.4 billion-yielding “synthetic dollar” token, plans to invest some of its reserves in tokenized real-world assets (RWA).
BlackRock's BUIDL fund is among the first applicants to express interest.
Ethena announced in a management post dated July 16 that it plans to allocate some of its 235 million USDT assets, approximately 7% of its collateral assets and $45 million in excess reserves. Ethena's token provides returns to investors by purchasing spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) and simultaneously selling or shorting perpetual swaps of assets on crypto exchanges, thus collecting the funding rate.
BlackRock's BUIDL, a money market fund represented by an Ethereum-based token, is seeking an allocation of $34 million from Ethena's $45 million reserves. This was explained in a post published Monday by Jonathan Espinosa of tokenization platform Securitize, BUIDL's distribution partner.
Mountain Protocol, the issuer of the USDM-yielding stablecoin, has also signaled interest in the application. Founder Michael Carrica responded to the management post last week, stating that the protocol would “submit a proposal in the coming days.”
According to Guy Young, founder of Ethena Labs, the development company behind the protocol, all potential applicants are required to publicly post their proposals on the governance forum.
*This is not investment advice.