Crypto: Standard Chartered sees Ethena's USDe multiplied by eight

A synthetic dollar on the menu of a FTSE 100 bank. Standard Chartered has published the results of a study conducted on Ethena and projects an outstanding USDe multiplied by eight by the end of 2028. The British bank supports its scenario on the convergence between DeFi and traditional finance, a field that its analysis office has been exploring for two years.

Key Points

• Standard Chartered launches analytical coverage of the Ethena protocol and aims for an eightfold increase by the end of 2028 for its synthetic dollar.
• The token circulates around $4.9 billion, compared to $14.8 billion at its peak on October 1, 2025.
• Revenues mainly come from funding rates on perpetuals and staking, a source that reverses in a bear market, even though collateral has since expanded to RWA.
• Prohibited from regulated issuance in Germany and outside the scope of stablecoin payments under the GENIUS Act, the USDe model will need to grow in Asia and offshore markets.

Standard Chartered opens coverage of Ethena

On Wednesday, September 30, the Ethena teams shared on X the results of the study conducted by Standard Chartered on the protocol and its stablecoin USDe.

Standard Chartered has initiated research coverage of Ethena.

They forecast potential USDe growth of ~8x in the next 2 years as the convergence of DeFi and TradFi accelerates.

Unclear why they are so bearish, but worth a read regardless: pic.twitter.com/JlzXqrqc07
--- Ethena (@ethena) September 30, 2026

The British institution is not a newcomer to the subject. Its digital assets research office, led by Geoff Kendrick, has been publishing numerical projections on Bitcoin as well as the market for tokenized dollars since 2024. It is the one that set the high bar for the sector.

<< We anticipate that the total supply of stablecoins will be multiplied by ten to reach $2 trillion by the end of 2028. >>
Geoff Kendrick, Global Head of Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered

Ethena's USDe currently circulates around $4.9 billion, far from the peak of $14.8 billion reached on October 1, 2025, just before the liquidation cascade on October 10. An eightfold increase, as envisaged by Standard Chartered, would bring the outstanding amount to $40 billion by the end of 2028, nearly three times the historical record of the token, in a stablecoin market that today exceeds or approaches $300 billion in total emissions.

USDe, a synthetic dollar backed by derivatives

To ensure the stability of its stablecoin, Ethena buys bitcoin and ether on the spot, then opens equivalent short positions on perpetual contracts. The portfolio becomes delta-neutral, meaning that the total value of the position in dollars does not move, regardless of the market direction. The protocol then collects the funding rates that leveraged buyers pay to sellers, along with the staking revenues from the collateral. Since 2026, an increasing share of the backing has shifted towards tokenized T-bills, institutional lending, and other basis trades, to be less dependent on crypto financing alone.

Indeed, the limits of the system have already been approached. The largest liquidation cascade in market history, on October 10, 2025, caused Binance's order book to display USDe as low as $0.65 for a few minutes. Collateralized positions in USDe were liquidated on the platform, where the oracle was fed by its own order book. Elsewhere, particularly on-chain, the token remained close to the dollar. The protocol continued to honor redemptions at one dollar each, and more than $2 billion was refunded in the days following without the underlying collateral giving way.

DeFi and traditional finance, Ethena's institutional bet

This derivatives mechanism is nevertheless of interest to the most traditional finance. Ethena launched the Converge blockchain with Securitize, an EVM-compatible network tailored for tokenized assets and institutional DeFi. The ENA token secures the network. The protocol also issues USDtb, a stablecoin backed by BlackRock's tokenized monetary fund BUIDL, and its issuance has been entrusted to Anchorage Digital Bank to comply with the requirements of the US GENIUS Act.

Europe remains the friction point. BaFin prohibited Ethena GmbH from issuing USDe in Germany in the spring of 2025, citing failures to comply with MiCA regarding reserves, organization, and capital, and the protocol subsequently withdrew its application for approval before relocating its European operations to the British Virgin Islands.

In the United States, USDe does not fall into the category of payment stablecoins under the GENIUS Act, due to a lack of cash and Treasury reserves and because the yield on sUSDe resembles too much an interest paid by the issuer. The eightfold growth anticipated by the bank will therefore occur in places that accept the synthetic model: Asia, the Middle East, and offshore markets. USDtb, on the other hand, takes another path, closer to the US federal framework.

The entire projection hinges on a yield gap. Since its launch in February 2024, sUSDe has served between 4% and over 25% annualized depending on market phases, peaking above 30% in the spring of 2024. A tokenized monetary fund backed by Treasury bills caps around 4%. As of late September 2026, the yield on sUSDe has returned near 5%. A situation that could still evolve, as Ethena has decided to open the list of assets that back USDe to tokenized stocks on Binance.

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