jakiro
Author: Liu Ye Jinghong
Ethena is a star product during this time. Whether it is directly launched Binance ENA or its stablecoin USDE, it has received great attention.Even if the market is relatively low now, Ethena’s TVL is still $ 2.4 billion.
Many people see that stable currency issued by mortgage tokens, and also gives high -yield product models. The first time I think of is Terra’s UST algorithm stablecoin. From 2021 to 2022Ten billion US dollars tvl, then collapsed with Terra Luna.
It is estimated that many readers will have this doubt, worrying or suspicion that Ethena is another imitation of the UST, and thunder.But I want to give a conclusion here:
Ethena’s USDE does not have thunder, but Ethena will have a marginal effect with the increase in the market size. It is likely that the USDE income is unlimited close to zero.
USDE’s distribution logic
Although the USDE is the same as UST, it uses mainstream cryptocurrencies as a mortgage and then issued at 1 US dollars according to the ticket surface, in fact, the funds operating logic of the two is very different.
UST is very simple in the operation of funds. How much the value of the user mortgage is available, how many USD is issued.But the core is that exam has a deep relationship with Luna.The higher the market’s demand for USS, the higher the price of Luna can cause a shrinking effect.The higher the price of LUNA, the more USS can be cast.
Therefore, in the essence of capital operation, the US left foot stepping on the right foot using the virtual market value to continue to rise.As LUNA was developed, there was a nearly infinite number of UST on the market, and the last tens of billions of funds collapsed.
In contrast, USDE is much more complicated in funding.
USDE mortgage and liquidation
First of all, although the USDE mortgage is mainstream cryptocurrency, it is not currently deposited directly in ETH or BTC, and only allows to buy USDE by depositing a series of stable currency assets (USDT, USDC, DAI, etc.).There is no liquidation risk for ordinary users.
For the white list users (usually institutions, exchanges, giant whales), they can deposit LST assets, that is, STETH to cast USDE, so whitelist users need to bear liquidation risks, but because Ethena will hedge,Therefore, in fact, it only needs to bear the price spread risk of ETH/STETH, and Ethena will be triggered when the price difference risk prediction is 65%.The largest difference between ETH/STETH historical record is nearly 8%during the Terra thunderstorm period in 2022.
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Therefore, in the case of normal operation of the product, this liquidation risk is almost impossible, so we can change a context: Ethena will only be liquidated when Lido’s STETH has systemic risk.
In addition, because Ethena’s leverage is close to the spot, even when the liquidation really occurs, it does not mean that Ethena directly loses all the collateral, but will gradually liquidate according to the relevant positions.And it should be noted that Ethena is not a decentralized product. He is a centralized asset management team operating in 7*24 hours, and has a centralized product with cooperation agreements with major exchanges.Therefore, Ethena explained in the official document that when there is a clear risk of liquidation, the asset management team will manually intervene in the reduction of risks.
USDE risk hedge
Secondly, Ethena did not lie on the book after completing the reserves, but instead adopted a more anti -web3 intuition for centralized asset management.
Whether it is a stable currency from ordinary users or the LST assets of users, it will be split according to the value of 1 US dollars.Item operation.Therefore, the official value equation is obtained:
1 USDE = 1 USD ETH+1 USD ETH short sustainable contract
Therefore, when Ethereum rises, the floating profit brought by the rise of the spot ETH will hedge the floating loss of the ETH empty order; when Ethereum falls, the floating profit of ETH empty orders will be hedled off the floating of the spot ETHdeficit.In the end, the USDE stability is worth $ 1.
In addition, Ethena completely depends on the centralized exchange on the risk hedging. At present, there are more than ten exchanges, including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget and so on.Therefore, Ethena avoided the web3 hacker attack in terms of funding security and obtained the liquidity of far exceeding the decentralized exchange and lower operating rates.
USDE’s return source
There are only two sources of USDE’s income:
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Reward obtained by pledged assets;
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The funding rate and base difference earned from risk convection;
The reward obtained by pledged assets is very well understood, that is, the consensus reward obtained by the pledged ETH. At present, Ethena has guaranteed the income by holding STETH. The current annualized interest rate is about 3%.
The most worthy of saying is the second profit earned from risk pair.The foundation difference is actually the long -term arbitrage of the public, and the funding rate is the rate that the multi -short parties in the contract transaction paid the other party based on the market advantage.
According to Ethena’s calculations, the rate of return on the 2021 period is 18%, -0.6%in 2022, 7%in 2023, and 18%so far in 2024.Although the annual market is very different, in terms of average long -term, the yield is above 10%.
The funding rate is to look at the market’s cattle and bears to determine the benefits.In the quotation of Bitcoin more than $ 70,000 or more last month, Binance’s capital rate was as high as 0.1%, so the yield of Susde was directly pushed to 30%.
But there is a very important point here. The core of Ethena’s hedging method is to shorte ETH, which means that once the market is weakened, Ethena needs to pay the short rate of short rates.Therefore, Ethena will appear in the bear market in the bear market that SUSDE is infinitely close to zero for a period of time.
However, it is more optimistic that Ethena also found that based on the data recovery, the number of days with 19.1%and 16.1%of the historic ETH and BTC perpetual futures appeared negative yields.The yield is 7.63%.
The most extreme situation is still in 2022. The Ethereum POW hard split arbitrage causes the market average rate of return to a negative value.
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Therefore, from the perspective of the dimension as the dimension, Ethena’s strategy is indeed long -term benefits.However, for the currency circle, it is a bit anti -human, because players in the currency circle often get stable currency in the bear market to make the winter, and in the bull market, the stable currency is taken out.The Ethena’s income fluctuation curve is just the opposite. It is very high in the bull market and the yield is very low in the bear market.
USDE’s risk and bottleneck
Although Ethena seems to be perfect in theory, and various risk control has been considered, there are still some potential black swan risks, and I think it is not far away.
Exchange risk
At present, Ethena’s risk countermeasures depend on the implementation of centralized exchanges, but the exchange itself is a risk point.For example, the daily downtime and network cables encountered are likely to expand the spread, but these can be solved by compensation or rollback.What really cannot be solved is policy and systemic risk.
The United States’ supervision of cryptocurrency exchanges is becoming stricter. The CZ of Binance was pledged and minus before, and then various exchanges were sued by SEC.What’s more, whether the next FTX is directly thunderstorm, resulting in huge bad debts in Ethena.These are the risk points of the Black Swan.
Lido systemic risk
Lido, as the leader of the Ethereum LST, has no major security accidents so far.But once it happened, not only Ethena’s mortgage, but even Ethereum ecology were severely damaged.Don’t forget that Ethereum two years ago, before the POS upgrade, STETH had a large amount of anchor.
Ethena will become the resistance of market rising
There is a joke in the currency circle. You play short contracts, which is equivalent to shorting your own business.That’s right, Ethena does this.
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This is a data board from Ethena. The entire market has an ETH -liquidation contract of US $ 8.6 billion, while Ethena’s position accounts for 13.52%, which is $ 1.162 billion.In addition, it is worth noting that the market for 86%of the US $ 86 million includes the positions of both and short parties. Even if the head of the head will be divided into multiple and short parties, the short -to -short funds should be $ 4.3 billion.Ethena is only short in the contract market, which means that Ethena accounts for 27%of the entire ETH Air Force funds.
This is just a few months after Ethena goes online, and the market is sluggish.Once the market returns to the rising cycle and Ethena’s income begins to rise, then more funds will inevitably deposit Ethena, then this air force position will be larger.
And because Ethena’s empty single positions are getting more and more, the higher the funds that need to be paid when the market downside. At this time, the marginal effects will cause unlimited income to approach zero.
Summarize
Write a small summary. Ethena is indeed a delicate design, but he is not DEFI, nor is it like the side of the US.If I let me describe it accurately, Ethena is a cryptocurrency -based fund product.
It makes traditional finance risks of hedging gameplay in cryptocurrencies and capture income from more intense fluctuations.At the same time, it is because of the characteristics of no license in the blockchain that anyone can buy such fund products without KYC and AML.
