Ethena Floats Plan to Use All Net Revenue for ENA Buybacks

The Ethena Foundation has launched a governance vote to route all net revenue generated across Ethena-branded businesses into programmatic buybacks of ENA. If approved, the proposed fee switch would effectively dedicate 100% of net revenue to purchasing ENA. According to the Foundation, the proposal went live on Snapshot on Thursday, Aug. 27, after receiving approval from Ethena's Risk Committee. The announcement did not specify when the vote will close. The Foundation also said it has purchased all remaining locked ENA held by certain major seed investors who sold the token over the past nine months. It did not name the investors, disclose the number of tokens involved, the total purchase value, or the buyout price, leaving the near-term reduction in future investor supply unclear. Separately, Ethena Labs and the Foundation said they have agreed to a Master Framework Agreement that assigns protocol intellectual property and ownership of value accrued by the protocol exclusively to the Foundation. The Foundation said those assets will be governed by ENA holders, and that Labs' equity investors will have no residual claim on protocol cash flow. The change updates the previously disclosed relationship between the token and the development company. Ethena's token-transparency filing describes Labs as a Portuguese company that provides services to the Foundation and its operating subsidiary. The filing says Labs has no membership or ownership interest in the Foundation, cannot appoint or remove directors, and does not direct Foundation decisions. It also states ENA holders do not have a contractual or programmatic right to protocol revenue distributions or treasury assets, though future revenue allocation is within the scope of ENA governance. The same filing disclosed that, as of a March 2026 update, USDe fees were allocated 54.6% to sUSDe rewards, 27.9% to partner rewards, and 17.5% to an Aave leverage program. In addition, the Foundation said it and lead investors agreed to eliminate future monthly venture-investor unlocks by releasing unvested investor tokens, while team tokens will continue to follow their original schedules. Ethena's initial allocation earmarked 25% of ENA's fixed 15 billion supply—or 3.75 billion tokens—for investors, with a one-year cliff followed by monthly vesting over three years. As of the announcement, the Snapshot vote was live and had Risk Committee approval.