Standard Chartered has set a $2 ENA price target for 2028, an 8x forecast tied to Ethena's new buyback mechanism and USDe growth.
Crypto Investment News
A major bank has initiated coverage and set a price target for Ethena's governance token (ENA). Standard Chartered published its first research note on ENA on Sept. 30, forecasting the token will reach $2.00 by the end of 2028. Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, wrote the note.
That figure represents close to an eightfold increase from where ENA traded on CoinMarketCap the same day, at $0.2739, up 7.46% over 24 hours. Kendrick set two intermediate markers on the way there: $0.42 by the end of 2026 and $1.10 by the end of 2027.
A Buyback Tied to Stablecoin Growth
The forecast leans on a mechanism Ethena's tokenomics put in place this month. In early September, ENA holders approved a fee switch through a Snapshot vote, and the Ethena Foundation's governance forum confirmed on Sept. 8 that the vote had passed. Once active, the mechanism sends 95% of net protocol revenue from three Ethena business lines into open-market ENA purchases.
That switch is not active yet. It only begins once USDe, Ethena's synthetic dollar, reaches $7.5 billion in circulating supply. USDe stood at $4.9 billion as of Sept. 30, according to DefiLlama, roughly 53% short of that mark. Beyond the first threshold, the buyback share climbs further: 10% of revenue at $10 billion of USDe supply, 15% at $15 billion, and 20% at $20 billion.
Kendrick's math centers on what happens if the USDe supply keeps climbing while ENA's price does not. At $40 billion of USDe supply and an unchanged ENA price, he estimated annual buybacks would consume about 23% of the token's entire circulating market value. He called that ratio too large to hold and concluded the price needs to rise for the mechanism to remain workable.
To support that reasoning, the note points to Uniswap as a precedent. Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Uniswap's token with a $100 target in June, a figure Kendrick said this year could prove too conservative. Since Uniswap activated its own fee switch in December 2025, buybacks there have settled at an annualized 3% to 4% of market value, helped along by the token roughly tripling in price over the same stretch.
Where the Growth Case Comes From
Standard Chartered's $2 target assumes USDe supply expands from its current $4.9 billion to $40 billion, inside a broader stablecoin market the bank expects to reach $2 trillion. The same note projects Bitcoin (BTC) at $300,000 and Ether (ETH) at $18,000 by the end of 2028, positioning ENA's forecast return above both.
Reaching that scale would require Ethena to keep diversifying its revenue. The protocol's original yield source, the basis trade of holding a spot asset against a matching short position in collateral-backed perpetual futures, has produced smaller returns since 2024, and USDe's supply has fallen from roughly $15 billion at its 2025 peak. USDe now ranks fourth among stablecoins by supply, trailing USDT, USDC and USDS.
In response, Ethena has spread its yield generation across several channels: over-collateralized lending through Aave and Morpho, institutional lending partly routed through Maple, holdings in liquid stablecoins, and short-term government debt products. A newer addition applies the same delta-neutral hedging approach to equity and commodity perpetual contracts, a category Standard Chartered said expanded from nothing to $15 million over 10 months.
The buyback mechanism sits inside a wider set of changes to ENA's supply structure announced in late August. The Foundation bought out locked tokens from seed investors who had sold ENA since the market's October 2025 high, while investors who had held on turned down an identical buyout offer. The remaining investor token unlocks, previously released monthly, now arrive in one batch on Oct. 5, after which about 12% of total supply stays locked with the team, ecosystem, and Foundation.
A separate agreement disclosed alongside the buyback reassigns Ethena's protocol intellectual property and revenue rights to the Foundation rather than Ethena Labs equity holders, though Ethena has called it an agreement in principle pending a final version in October. Ethena also expanded into consumer payments on Sept. 1, launching Ethena Pay, a USDe-based savings and spending app, on the Avalanche network.
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