Who is Guy Young? The founder behind Ethena and USDe

Guy Young founded and leads Ethena Labs, the company behind USDe, a dollar-pegged token backed by crypto assets, loans and offsetting trades. He began building it in 2023 after leaving a six-year career at Cerberus Capital Management.

Within 20 months of launch, USDe passed $14 billion. Roughly two thirds of its supply disappeared after the October 2025 market crash. Young has spent 2026 replacing most of the token's backing and revising how ENA rewards holders.

Who Guy Young is and what he built

A 2023 blog post inspired Guy Young to build one of crypto's largest dollar tokens. He remains chief executive of the company that issues it.

Ethena calls USDe a synthetic dollar. Like a stablecoin, it is designed to hold a value of one US dollar. Most stablecoins use cash and government debt as backing. USDe maintains its $1 value through crypto assets, loans and offsetting trades.

On 5 Oct 2026, DefiLlama's stablecoin rankings showed $4.909 billion of USDe in circulation, behind only Tether's USDT, Circle's USDC and Sky's USDS. Young's CoinDesk Most Influential 2025 profile credited him with creating a new category of yield-paying dollar tokens.

• Full name: Guy Young
• Role: Founder and chief executive of Ethena Labs
• Earlier work: Seven years across investment banking, hedge funds and private equity, six of them at Cerberus Capital Management
• Founded Ethena: 2023
• Tokens: USDe (synthetic dollar), sUSDe (its reward-earning version), USDtb (a dollar token issued through Anchorage Digital Bank) and ENA (governance token)
• Based in: Lisbon, Portugal, according to his Crunchbase profile

Neither Ethena's documentation nor Young's published biographies disclose his age, nationality or education.

Guy Young's career before Ethena

Young's background in credit investing shaped Ethena's design. According to his Blockworks biography, he spent six years investing in financial services businesses at Cerberus Capital Management, a firm with $60 billion under management.

He became head of principal investments at a Cerberus affiliate, says a press biography on Qwoted, a secondary source supplied on his behalf. In that role, he led the firm's expansion into Australia and oversaw investments in banking, specialty finance, insurance and fintech.

Arthur Hayes wrote in March 2024 that Young took up crypto during the DeFi boom of 2020. DeFi, short for decentralised finance, covers lending and trading run by software on a blockchain. Young discussed his move into crypto in an October 2023 interview on Castle Island Ventures' On the Brink podcast.

How Guy Young founded Ethena

In March 2023, Hayes published "Dust on Crust", the essay Ethena's documentation credits as the project's origin. It proposed a dollar token backed by crypto assets and derivatives, contracts whose value follows another asset's price. No bank would hold the reserves.

Young put together a team and adapted the design. Hayes wrote in his 2024 essay that Maelstrom, his family office, joined as a founding adviser in May 2023 and received governance tokens in return.

A $6 million seed round on 17 Jul 2023 brought backing from Dragonfly Capital, Maelstrom and exchange investors including Bybit, OKX Ventures, Deribit and Gemini, according to DefiLlama's record of Ethena's raises. The next round raised $14 million on 16 Feb 2024 at a $300 million company valuation.

DefiLlama recorded a further $100 million on 24 Feb 2025 from investors including Franklin Templeton and Pantera Capital. It puts total funding at $166 million.

USDe's public launch came with a rewards campaign that began on 19 Feb 2024, The Defiant reported. Six weeks later, by which time supply had reached $1.3 billion, Ethena distributed 750 million ENA tokens to early users through an airdrop, a free token distribution. That represented 5% of ENA's 15 billion supply.

ENA gives holders a vote on how the protocol is run.

Guy Young and Ethena timeline

How Ethena's USDe works under Guy Young

USDe maintains its dollar value by pairing assets with trades that offset their price movements. Under the original design in Ethena's explanation of how USDe works, the protocol holds a crypto asset and opens an equally sized short position, a bet that profits when the price falls.

A 10% drop in the asset produces an equivalent gain on the short, keeping their combined dollar value unchanged. Ethena takes the short position through perpetual futures, contracts that track an asset's price without expiring.

Perpetual futures traders on one side of a contract pay those on the other side a fee called the funding rate, usually every eight hours. When more traders bet on rising prices, they pay those betting on a fall. Ethena collects those payments. Our dashboard compares live funding rates across six exchanges.

Professional traders call the pairing a basis trade. It earns the gap between the futures price and the spot price, which is the price for immediate delivery. Users who stake USDe by locking it in Ethena's contract receive sUSDe, a token that collects the protocol's earnings.

Funding payments shrank as crypto markets cooled, leaving the trade behind only a small fraction of USDe. The Risk Committee's June governance update reported the following backing mix at the start of July 2026.

Ethena held $1.0159 of assets for each USDe, a backing ratio of 101.59%, according to the same update. The reserve fund contained about $62 million. At the end of June, sUSDe paid 3.84% a year. Our DeFi yields dashboard compares returns from other dollar pools.

What the October 2025 crash did to Ethena

USDe's first growth phase ended with the market crash of 10 Oct 2025. That month, supply reached a 14-day average of $14.65 billion, according to Blockworks Advisory's analysis on Ethena's governance forum.

The sell-off triggered liquidations. These are forced closures of leveraged positions when the collateral pledged to back them runs out. Leverage means trading with borrowed money, and our crypto liquidations dashboard tracks those closures live.

USDe briefly traded below $0.66 on Binance, The Block reported. The exchange paid about $283 million to users affected between 21:36 and 22:16 UTC who held USDe or two other tokens as collateral. Binance said the wider sell-off had bottomed about 15 minutes before those prices broke.

Redemptions continued for months. By late August 2026, USDe supply was $4.07 billion, down 72% from the peak. Blockworks Advisory also found that sUSDe paid less than sUSDS, Sky's rival savings token, on 243 of the 705 days it studied.

Lower supply brought lower earnings. DefiLlama's Ethena income statement, available on the same page as its funding record, puts gross protocol revenue at $151.08 million in the third quarter of 2025 and $53.55 million in the third quarter of 2026. Our ranking of the highest-earning crypto projects shows Ethena's current position.

ENA closed at $0.07204 on 30 Jun 2026, according to StablecoinX's quarterly results. Its record high was $1.52 on 11 Apr 2024.

How Guy Young is rebuilding Ethena

Young responded to the collapse by seeking earnings for USDe that can hold up when crypto traders stop paying to bet on rising prices.

• Coinbase as main custodian: Coinbase became Ethena's primary custodian in June 2026, taking responsibility for holding its assets. It also became the wallet provider and perpetual futures venue across more than $5 billion of assets, according to the Risk Committee's June update. Coinbase Ventures separately bought ENA on the open market.
• Tokenised credit funds: In June, the Risk Committee approved two AAA-rated funds of collateralised loan obligations as backing. Collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) bundle corporate loans. Janus Henderson, a $480 billion asset manager that also invested in ENA, runs one of the funds.
• A $1 billion lending facility: Ethena and FalconX announced a secured facility on 19 Aug 2026. It lends USDe's backing assets to institutions against collateral worth more than the loan.
• Stocks: On 25 Sep 2026, Ethena extended its paired trade to tokenised stocks on Binance, using stock perpetual futures to offset them. Young told The Block this was "the most significant expansion of USDe's funding mechanism since we started". Hyperliquid lists the same kind of contract, and we track its perpetuals on stocks and indices.
• A consumer app: Ethena Pay launched in beta on 1 Sep 2026. Built on Avalanche, the money app lets users hold their own funds and spend with a Visa card. It opened in 48 countries, excluding the US, the EU and the UK.
• A listed company holding ENA: StablecoinX began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker USDE on 26 Jun 2026. Its holdings of about 3 billion ENA represent roughly 20% of total supply.

DefiLlama's rankings show USDe grew 13.33% in the month to 5 Oct 2026 as supply began recovering. Standard Chartered initiated research coverage of ENA on 30 Sep 2026, forecasting a $2 token price by the end of 2028 and USDe supply of about $40 billion.

Meeting the bank's forecast would require USDe to grow more than eightfold. Ethena's own governance proposal targets more than $100 billion within five years.

Guy Young's net worth and ENA holdings

Guy Young's net worth has not been made public. Any quoted figure is an estimate.

Core contributors, including the Ethena Labs team and advisers, have 30% of ENA's 15 billion supply reserved for them under Ethena's tokenomics. That amounts to 4.5 billion tokens, but Young's personal allocation is undisclosed.

The tokens were locked for one year before a quarter was released. The rest vest, or become available, monthly over three years. At the $0.24 ENA price shown on DefiLlama's Ethena page on 5 Oct 2026, the entire contributor pool was worth about $1.08 billion on paper.

That day, ENA ranked 59th among crypto assets with a market value of $2.47 billion. The current figure appears on our live crypto prices page.

How the August overhaul changed ENA

Until this year, investor tokens followed the same vesting schedule. On 27 Aug 2026, the Ethena Foundation announced it had bought the locked tokens of major seed investors who had sold ENA since the October 2025 peak.

Investors who had not sold received an offer to exit at their purchase price. None accepted, The Block reported. Among the sellers, one wallet declined the buyout.

The remaining investor tokens are released from 5 Oct 2026, ending monthly investor unlocks. An unlock makes previously locked tokens available to sell. Team tokens, including Young's, retain their original schedule, with about 12% of supply still locked. Our token unlock calendar lists scheduled releases across the market.

Ethena Labs and the foundation also agreed in principle that the protocol's intellectual property and economic value belong to the foundation, according to the announcement. ENA holders govern the foundation. Ethena Labs shareholders have no claim on those assets or economic value.

When ENA buybacks start

Token holders subsequently approved a buyback plan known as a fee switch. The governance forum confirmed the result on 8 Sep 2026.

As USDe supply passes set thresholds, the foundation receives a share of gross protocol revenue. It then spends 95% of its net revenue buying ENA on the open market.

OAK Research published these illustrative dollar figures in the same forum thread using a 6% protocol yield. Blockworks Advisory put the realised yield at 4.60%. No buybacks are running with USDe supply at $4.9 billion.

Why regulators restrict Guy Young's USDe

USDe cannot be offered in the European Union. Ethena serves the United States through a separate token.

On 21 Mar 2025, Germany's financial regulator, BaFin, prohibited Ethena GmbH from offering USDe, citing serious deficiencies in its application under MiCA, the EU's crypto rulebook.

The regulator also said it had grounds to suspect sUSDe tokens were securities being offered to the public in Germany. Issuance of USDe continued through Ethena (BVI) Limited. BaFin noted that the British Virgin Islands company had issued the token since 1 Jan 2025.

Ethena GmbH withdrew its application on 3 Apr 2025. On 14 Apr, BaFin ordered the German company to wind up its USDe business and disclosed a €600,000 coercive fine. The company later lodged an objection. BaFin said these were its first measures under MiCA.

In July 2025, the US GENIUS Act established rules for dollar tokens. Days later, Anchorage Digital announced that its federally chartered bank would issue USDtb, Ethena's second dollar token.

A tokenised BlackRock fund provides most of USDtb's backing, The Block reported. On 5 Oct 2026, DefiLlama's USDtb page showed $533.61 million in circulation.

The risks of holding USDe and ENA

Both USDe and ENA can lose value. USDe also carries risks that a cash-backed dollar token avoids.

• Earnings can fall or turn negative: If traders betting on falling prices dominate, funding payments reverse. Ethena must then pay rather than collect, as its funding risk documentation explains. The crypto basis trade yielded -0.1% at the end of June 2026.
• Price can break on a single exchange: In October 2025, USDe traded below $0.66 on Binance. A drop in an exchange's quoted price can trigger liquidation for anyone using USDe as collateral on a leveraged trade. The entire amount posted as margin, the collateral behind the position, can be lost.
• Borrowers and custodians can fail: Loans and credit funds accounted for almost two thirds of USDe's backing at the start of July 2026. A borrower, lending protocol or custodian default would affect the assets behind USDe.
• Withdrawals take time: Blockworks Advisory's forum analysis notes that leaving sUSDe involves a seven-day cooldown.
• Rules can close a market: BaFin's 2025 orders removed USDe from the EU within weeks.
• ENA is volatile and buybacks are conditional: ENA has traded between $0.07 and $1.52. For buybacks to begin, USDe supply must grow by more than half from its level on 5 Oct 2026.