Ethena put its long-awaited fee switch to an onchain vote today, and unlike past chatter about "flipping it on," this push comes with a tangible revenue ladder attached. The proposal, laid out in a broader ecosystem update, would tie the size of ENA buybacks directly to how much USDe the protocol has outstanding.
• The mechanism: The switch works in two layers. First, the share of Ethena's gross protocol revenue routed to the Foundation rises in steps as USDe supply grows: 5% once USDe passes $7.5B, 10% at $10B, 15% at $15B, and higher from there, per Blockworks Advisory's breakdown. Second, 95% of whatever the Foundation collects would go straight to ENA buybacks, with the rest funding growth.
• The backtest: Reviewing the design for Ethena's governance forum, Blockworks found the trigger would have been active just 118 of the last 705 days, buying ENA at roughly a $52.7M annualized pace whenever it was live. On the 93 days sUSDe already out-yielded Sky's sUSDS, it stayed ahead after the buyback's cut on 82 of them. The other 11 slipped behind by less than a tenth of a percentage point.
• Also announced: The fee switch arrived alongside a cleanup of ENA's other big overhang. The Foundation spent the past two weeks buying out early investors who'd sold into the market since October, and Labs agreed in principle to hand the protocol's IP and economic upside to the Foundation rather than its own equity holders. Ethena also filed with the Blockworks Token Transparency Framework, joining +40 other protocols in the disclosure standard.