Standard Chartered sees Ethena’s USDe reaching $40B, ENA hitting $2

Standard Chartered’s research team opened coverage of Ethena with bullish forecasts for the protocol’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDe, and its governance token, ENA. The bank projects USDe supply could reach $40 billion by the end of 2028, an approximately eightfold increase, as Ethena broadens its yield generation beyond traditional crypto basis trades into decentralized finance, institutional lending and real-world assets. Those diversified sources currently produce a blended yield of about 5.2%, giving the protocol more capacity to scale. Central to Standard Chartered’s valuation case for ENA is Ethena’s fee-switch mechanism, approved by governance in September, which will route 95% of net protocol revenue toward ENA buybacks once USDe crosses specific supply thresholds. Ethena’s own modelling indicates that at a $25 billion USDe supply level, and assuming a 6% gross protocol yield with a 25% net revenue take rate, annual ENA buybacks could total roughly $375 million. The bank estimates that if USDe reaches $40 billion and ENA’s price remained static, buybacks could equal about 23% of the token’s circulating market capitalization — a level Standard Chartered characterizes as unlikely to persist. To account for that dynamic, Standard Chartered expects ENA’s market price to appreciate until buyback volumes normalize as a smaller share of market value; the bank points to Uniswap (UNI) as a precedent where annualized buyback rates fell to roughly 3–4% as the token’s price rose. Based on these calculations, the report sets a year-end 2028 price target of $2 for ENA, versus a quoted price near $0.27–$0.28 at the time of publication; ENA’s market capitalization was about $2.65 billion according to CoinGecko data cited in the report. The research note also situates Ethena’s outlook within a larger forecast for tokenized assets, which Standard Chartered expects to expand from about $350 billion today to $4 trillion by 2028. That expansion would widen the pool of assets Ethena could use to generate yield and help the stablecoin scale. The bank’s coverage included broader digital-asset price projections through 2028, with Bitcoin and Ether targets of $300,000 and $18,000 respectively.