Ethena Just Paid Its Early Investors to Exit as ENA Nears 100% Rally

Ethena (ENA) jumped 11% after its Foundation bought out seed investors who sold after the October 2025 peak. The move capped a near-100% monthly rally as an ENA buyback vote went live.

The token has carried the same weight since launch, with early investor tokens unlocking every month. That supply drip just ended.

Ethena Buys Out Investors Who Sold After the Peak

The Ethena Foundation announced the deal Thursday, indicating that they spent the past two weeks buying locked tokens directly from early backers. Each was originally allocated more than 0.25% of ENA supply.

We are excited to announce four updates regarding the Ethena ecosystem, further details on each point are provided in the blog linked below:1. Buyout of early investors:The Ethena Foundation executed a buyout of all locked tokens from certain major seed investors that sold any…

— Ethena Foundation (@EthenaFndtn) August 27, 2026

The Foundation split those backers into two groups:

• Investors who sold any ENA after the October 10, 2025, peak had their locked tokens bought out.

Only one wallet said no.

• Investors who never sold got a full-price offer.

None accepted.

“As a result, the investors who have been selling into the market during the relevant time frame now hold no unvested ENA which could be sold into the market in the future,” the Foundation wrote in its blog.

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The rest of the investor calendar now ends early. All remaining investor tokens unlock on October 5, 2026, and the monthly calendar disappears. Team tokens stay locked on their original schedules. Roughly 12% of supply stays locked, all of it team, ecosystem, and Foundation holdings.

The pressure this fixes was real. Ethena released 171.88 million tokens in early August alone. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes bought 9.05 million ENA days before that release.

One large holder sits outside the deal. StablecoinX, an ENA treasury company, still holds about 20% of supply under a separate lockup disclosed in SEC filings.

ENA Buyback Vote Ties the Fee Switch to USDe Growth

The fee switch is the second piece. A Snapshot governance vote, open through September 2, would send protocol revenue into ENA purchases. Ethena’s Risk Committee has already approved the design.

There is a catch. Buybacks only start once USDe circulating supply reaches $7.5 billion. At that level, 5% of protocol revenue buys ENA. The share scales up to 20% if supply reaches $20 billion.

USDe sits near $4.6 billion today, down from a 2025 peak of about $15 billion. So the switch stays off until supply climbs roughly $3 billion. The Foundation says it wants USDe above $100 billion within five years.

Once that first threshold hits, 95% of net revenue paid to the Foundation funds the purchases. Each buy will be tracked on Ethena’s public dashboard.

The playbook has precedent. Uniswap’s fee switch proposal sent UNI to a two-month high last November.

Ethena also addressed a second old doubt. A Master Framework Agreement, due in October, hands protocol intellectual property and residual value to tokenholders. Ethena Labs equity investors get neither. The Foundation says Labs equity has never taken a dollar of protocol revenue.

Will the ENA Rally Hold?

ENA trades near $0.155 after gaining 11% in 24 hours. The token is up 56.5% in a week and 84.6% over the past 30 days. Its market cap stands near $1.52 billion.

The bull case is simple. The sellers are gone, the unlock calendar dies in October, and a buyback pipeline is on the ballot. The bear case is just as clean. Buybacks stay off until USDe nearly doubles, and StablecoinX’s 20% stake sits outside the deal.

The Snapshot vote still needs quorum. From there, the signal to watch is USDe supply. Every dollar it climbs brings the ENA buyback switch closer.