Season 4 Highlights

Today marks the end of Ethena Season 4 and the beginning of Season 5.

Season 4 saw meaningful expansion of USDe across major venues. USDe became the fastest dollar asset to reach $10B in supply and continues to grow on the back of deeper integrations and partnerships. USDe’s adoption across DeFi grew significantly. Notably, “Aavependlethena” (where Pendle’s interest rate derivatives on USDe and sUSDe are used as collateral on Aave) grew to $6B+ in scale, reflecting USDe’s effectiveness as a scalable collateral primitive. USDe listed on exchanges including Binance, Kraken, and Hyperliquid, as well as other distribution channels including Telegram Wallet, Ledger, and OneKey, significantly broadening access across the world to hundreds of millions of users.

Across the ecosystem, Ethena Ecosystem builders such as Terminal, Strata, and Based advance new USDe use cases. These initiatives will continue to benefit sENA holders, who remain eligible for external rewards from ecosystem partners.

More details on the Season 4 distribution and the exact date will follow shortly. Initial Season 5 rewards data and Season 4 preliminary totals will display on the website shortly.

Season 5

Users are already automatically accruing Season 5 points starting September 24. Similar to prior seasons, users who have previously participated in Ethena rewards programs will automatically receive a boost to Season 5 rewards. Season 5 will run for roughly six months.

Given the importance of DeFi integrations, including Pendle, Aave, Morpho, Fluid, Euler, and others, we have no intention of materially impacting Pendle market return profiles we saw in Season 4 as we move into Season 5. We intend to grow our existing DeFi depth and activity alongside broader USDe integrations.

Against this backdrop, a brief note on Pendle Yield Tokens (YT) dynamics. The November Pendle markets are currently priced at 7-8% - while prior results are not necessarily indicative of future outcomes, YT buyers at this level (and even ~100-200bps above) have not historically realized losses. For context, sUSDe has averaged ~8% over the last 3 months - the November sUSDe market at ~8% is pricing in no incremental value from the S5 Ethena Points allocated to YT purchasers if this sUSDe rate continues going forward.

Our aim is to maintain and support this market with healthy, sustainable participation consistent with long-term protocol health as we did in Season 4.