The Rise and Rise of Synthetic Stables With Ethena

Welcome to The Gwart Show! Today, we are joined by Guy, the founder of Ethena, one of crypto's fastest-growing stablecoin projects, which reached $6 billion faster than any dollar-pegged asset in history. We discuss how Ethena's synthetic dollar works by capturing funding rates from perpetual futures markets, why they've embraced centralized exchanges while maintaining neutrality, and their ambitious new Converge blockchain. The conversation explores stablecoin competition, the limitations of decentralized approaches, and how they plan to bridge traditional finance with crypto through their partnership with Securitize.

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# Notes:

- Ethena reached $6B faster than any dollar asset

- Currently offering ~16% yield (avg 18% last year)

- Uses Bitcoin perps funding rates for yield

- Maintains neutrality across exchanges

- Converge is launching with Securitize partnership

- Looking to tokenize equities and T-bills

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

00:19 Guy's background

03:11 What's Ethena?

04:52 What hasn't this been tried before?

06:50 Rival stablecoins

10:57 Where are the risks?

15:13 Hyperliquid cancels order

18:04 How to compete with other stablecoins

21:01 One stablecoins to rule them all!

22:47 Why no yeild yet?

24:54 Why USDE isn't for payments (yet)

27:25 Superiority of a yield asset

30:54 What is Converge?

34:16 Alt L1?

34:31 Why build a new chain?

37:51 ETH in stagnation?

39:43 Vitalik the business man?

41:35 ETH as collateral for stablecoins

43:58 RWAs

48:15 Regulatory capture

49:57 Why equities on-chain?

54:16 On-chain price discovery

56:47 Airdrops

58:52 AMMs

1:01:57 Perpetual Futures funding rates

1:06:54 Trading edge

1:07:39 Citadel

1:10:09 Payment for order flow

👋 The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Ellipsis Labs is building Atlas, the blockchain purpose-built for verifiable finance. You may know of Ellipsis Labs by their first product Phoenix, a fully on-chain orderbook DEX that’s done over 50 billion dollars in unincentivized volume. They are one of the strongest teams I know in crypto. If you’re interested in working for a mission-driven company, Ellipsis Labs is hiring engineers passionate about crypto and finance to work on Atlas. You can learn more and apply on Ellipsis Labs’ Twitter “at Ellipsis_Labs”. Don’t forget to check out Atlas too, @atlasxyz on Twitter.

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