One of the most highly anticipated new projects in crypto is officially launching. And it’s aiming to disrupt the paradigm of stablecoins.

‍What’s happening:‍

• Ethena’s governance token has officially launched on multiple centralized crypto exchanges
  
• Ethena previously raised $14M USD in venture capital funding, led by prominent digital asset fund Dragonfly and BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes
  

The big idea:‍

• Ethena is a synthetic stablecoin, which means they are not relying on direct fiat currency or asset backing in order to underpin its value
  
• Instead, Ethena hedges derivative positions against collateral that is being held by the protocol and leverages different methods of arbitraging against new governance tokens being minted in order to maintain a stable peg
  
• Any capital generated by Ethena hedging their positions or staking their Ethereum is then returned to the protocol to be shared with stablecoin holders
  

Why it matters:‍

• Stablecoins have seen enormous new capital inflows with the upswing in the price Bitcoin and digital assets as a whole
  

By the numbers:‍

• The current combined market capitalization of USDC and Tether is approximately $136B USD
  

Going deeper:‍

• Circle, who is the parent company of popular stablecoin USDC, previously confidentially filed for an IPO on a major United States stock exchange

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