After an Incredible 2024 for USDe, Ethena Plans to Supercharge Growth - Ep. 751
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Has roughly 50 to 60% of its TBL is built on their CSD. You know, Aave added more than a 1,000,000,000 in in a couple of months. And so whether sort of like other DeFi apps like Athena or not, you kind of have to engage with their CSD in some way because it's becoming that sort of important to the to the rest of DeFi.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. And today, we have one from Luke Youngblood, a past guest, who is working on Moonwell. He commented on the show about how a court struck down the sanctions on the Tornado Cash smart contracts. And he said, judges really care about what things are called. For example, the fact that smart contracts are called contracts led to the bad lower court decision that rolled contracts were considered property and could be sanctioned even thoug
Thanks for having me.
Athena Labs' synthetic dollar, USDE, has had an incredible year. It launched in February and is now the 3rd largest stable coin behind USDT and USDC. Since November 1st, just a month and a half ago, its market cap has more than doubled to nearly $6,000,000,000 and it's even overtaken Dai, which is a long standing DeFi native stable coin. So how do you feel about these achievements? And did you ever imagine it would grow this quickly? Yeah.
I think we're obviously generally pleased, especially with the fact that, I guess, we saw a bit of an unwind in the supply in the middle of the year when when the market cooled off. I remember in the in the first podcast that we did together, we sort of did describe the fact that the product was gonna be quite reflective to the cycle, I. E. When, you know, interest rates are high within crypto, when sentiment is quite bullish, the product does quite well. And then when it's not, it it really was intended to sort of shrink, and we did sort of see that through the course of this year. So I I was
Yeah. I mean, the thing about the unwind is it reminds me of the time when, I guess it was around like 3 AC era. You know, we saw a lot of unwinds in DeFi that just happened very, you know, as planned. And what's the word I'm looking for? Just, very smoothly. And obviously, there was just a lot of turmoil in the centralized part of the market. And one other thing is just that I think like it shows that, you know, I asked you about these big accomplishments recently, but you were most proud of like how you weathered that storm, which given obviously everything that happened in 2022 makes sense.
I think, again, I was even quite pleasantly surprised with the speed of growth. The fact that it's outpacing ETFs, I think, is quite insane even to me. I did not expect that in in the last couple of months. I do think it's a pretty strong demonstration, though, that there is actually just so much capital in the world that is looking for a return on dollars. And I think we don't actually appreciate that being able to generate, you know, Athena's APY recently has been north of 20% pretty consistently to be able to do that on 1,000,000,000 of dollars of capital, we really haven't even scratched t
wow. This is so interesting. I definitely wanna ask you a little bit more about that. But first, why don't we actually just talk about US TV, which is announcing the date before this podcast comes out. And why don't you first explain what that is and how it works? Yeah.
I mean, that's a very simple stable coin. So it looks almost the same as USDC and USDT. I think the only difference here is that we're backing that
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