Standard Chartered sees over 600% upside for ENA, expects USDe to hit $40 billion by 2028

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Ethena on Wednesday, forecasting that its ENA token will reach $2 by the end of 2028 as the stablecoin issuer expands its yield-generating asset base and buyback program.

ENA changed hands at $0.26 on Wednesday, according to The Block's ENA price page. Standard Chartered's target implies roughly 669% upside from that level. The bank also expects Ethena's USDe outstanding supply to grow more than eightfold, from $4.9 billion today to about $40 billion by the end of 2028.

Ethena ranks as the fourth-largest stablecoin issuer behind Tether, Circle, and Sky, and second among issuers of yield-bearing stablecoins behind Sky. Yield-bearing stablecoins account for about 5% of the broader stablecoin market today, according to Standard Chartered.

Scaling yield buybacks

In a note to clients, Standard Chartered said Ethena is broadening the yield engine behind USDe as returns from the crypto basis trade have fallen. The bank highlighted real-world assets, DeFi and institutional lending, liquid stablecoins, and equity and commodity-linked basis trades as newer sources of yield.

Separately, Ethena has expanded that strategy into tokenized equities through Binance’s bStocks, using the assets as spot backing for USDe and Binance equity perpetuals to hedge the exposure, The Block reported.

“The broader asset base for yield generation enables scalability,” the bank said, forecasting tokenized assets, including stablecoins and other RWAs, will rise to $4 trillion by the end of 2028 from about $350 billion today.

The other half of Standard Chartered’s ENA thesis rests on what happens to the token as USDe grows. Ethena’s fee switch, which passed with 100% of votes, calls for 95% of net revenue generated across businesses under the Ethena brand to be used to buy back ENA programmatically.

If outstanding USDe reaches $40 billion by end-2028 while ENA remains at its current price, Standard Chartered calculates that annualized buybacks would amount to about 23% of the token’s circulating value. The bank considers that level too high to be sustainable, arguing that ENA would need to appreciate until the buyback rate settles at a lower level.

"For these buybacks to be sustainable, the ENA token price will rise," the bank wrote.

For a reference point, Standard Chartered points to Uniswap, where the annualized buyback rate has settled at roughly 3% to 4% since its fee switch was activated in December 2025. The bank said UNI has roughly tripled since it began covering the token in June, with the price increase helping offset what would otherwise have been an unsustainably high share of tokens bought back.

Meanwhile, the bank sees slower-than-expected growth in yield-bearing stablecoins as the main risk to the forecast. Weaker growth in real-world assets deployed on blockchains would pose an additional risk because Ethena increasingly relies on those assets to generate yield.