Ethena (ENA) perpetual market

Ethena is the governance token of a decentralized finance protocol that issues USDe, a dollar-pegged synthetic asset. Launched in 2024, Ethena maintains USDe's peg not with fiat reserves in a bank but through a delta-neutral strategy: it holds crypto collateral such as staked ether and simultaneously opens offsetting short positions on derivatives exchanges, so gains and losses cancel out while the position captures staking yield and funding payments. That yield can be passed to holders who stake USDe, which drove rapid growth but also concentrated attention on the risks of relying on exchange funding rates and custody. The ENA token governs the protocol and its parameters. Ethena became one of the fastest-growing dollar-denominated assets in crypto, and a prominent test case for so-called synthetic dollars that seek to offer stablecoin-like utility and native yield without holding traditional cash reserves.