Ethena Founder: The Next Chapter For Ethena | Guy Young

When capital can move around the world at the speed of information and these things can scale at, like, the marginal cost of software, it's, the first time that finance can actually scale at the cost of software. You get outcomes like this or, you know, the hyperliquids or or the pumps where you've got, you know, ten, twenty people sitting in there, and they're generating billions of dollars without needing more people to to sort of get there. So I think that's actually one of the really interesting things about, like, on chain businesses where when you hit real, like, escape velocity, they do

Yeah. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. Alright, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. We got Guy from Athena back on the show. Guy, what's happening, man?

Not so much. Oh, thanks.

Good. Good. Good. Guy, I there's a ton to talk about, including stripes chain and hyper liquid and perps and but we should start with Athena first. Right? Because I was I was going through the numbers before this. Yeah. I think most people on the who are listening will be very familiar with Athena, but maybe unfamiliar with just how quickly you guys have grown. So let me just call out a couple of the numbers. USDE just crossed 12,000,000,000 market caps, the fastest stablecoin in history to reach that. USDE outpaced all USD assets in notional supply growth. Athena crossed 500,000,000 in cumula

Yeah. I think two two pieces. I think one was actually just luck because I think when we first came out, I remember when we had the first pod maybe back in March '84, you know, like, weeks after Athena had just launched. If you remember back then, funding rates or, like, rates in crypto were kind of, like, 60% annualized at that period of time. And so, you know, there was literally not a better period in time in the last sort of five years for us to come out, and we were very fortunate, I think, just with the timing. So I think that obviously helps the growth because it's very it's not very di

Yeah. How do you think about the business today and just the the sweet if you're maybe explaining this to a noncrypto person. Right? Because you guys launched with, the synthetic dollar, right, USDE.

Yeah. So the the core business is still fundamentally driven by USDE, and I think even though we sort of put ancillary products, etcetera, around it or different distribution channels, whether it's a chain, exchanges, all these different pieces, the core piece that still drives the business is just the size of USDE. I think one piece that people don't fully appreciate is just, you know, because of the gross interest income that's actually produced on the USDE balances, I. E, 2024, produced around 18% APY on USDE, don't you actually need USDE to be $50.70, dollars 80,000,000,000 in size to be p

Yeah. And you guys I'm gonna ask a bunch of dumb questions in this podcast. This will be the first dumb one. You guys are taking 20% of the interest?

It's changed quite a bit through time. So, yeah, it's been anywhere between, like, actually zero to 50%. You know, there's been discussions around, like, a few switcher and and how that's gonna be formalized around Athena that's, you know, basically just waiting for a few more milestones to be hit. Bu