TLDR
- Standard Chartered started coverage on Ethena, setting a $2 price target for ENA by the end of 2028.
- The bank expects USDe, Ethena’s stablecoin, to grow from $4.9 billion to $40 billion over that period.
- ENA traded around $0.26 on Wednesday, meaning the target implies about 669% upside.
- Ethena’s fee switch sends 95% of net revenue toward buying back ENA tokens.
- ENA rose over 5% following the news and is up more than 77% over the past month.
Standard Chartered has started covering Ethena, giving its ENA token a price target of $2 by the end of 2028. The bank’s analyst, Geoff Kendrick, based the forecast on Ethena’s growing role in stablecoins, tokenization, and perpetual contracts.
ENA traded at $0.26 on Wednesday. That makes the bank’s target about 669% higher than the current price.
Standard Chartered’s forecast centers on USDe, Ethena’s stablecoin. The bank expects USDe supply to grow more than eightfold, from $4.9 billion today to roughly $40 billion by 2028.
Ethena is currently the fourth-largest stablecoin issuer, trailing Tether, Circle, and Sky. It ranks second among yield-bearing stablecoin issuers, behind Sky.
USDe’s Expanding Yield Sources
The bank said Ethena is broadening how USDe generates yield. Returns from the crypto basis trade, the strategy USDe originally relied on, have dropped recently.
BREAKING: Standard Chartered initiates coverage on Ethena's ENA with a $2 price target, forecasting USDe supply reaching $40 billion by 2028.
Ethena's total value locked stands at $5.30 billion, up 13.7% over the past 30 days.@ethena pic.twitter.com/Ea5zgM0HUk
— MSB Intel (@MSBIntel) October 1, 2026
Newer yield sources include real-world assets, DeFi lending, institutional lending, and equity or commodity-linked basis trades. Ethena has also moved into tokenized equities through Binance’s bStocks product.
Standard Chartered projects that tokenized assets overall, including stablecoins and other real-world assets, will reach $4 trillion by 2028. That figure stood at about $350 billion as of this year.
The Buyback Mechanism
A large part of the ENA forecast depends on Ethena’s fee switch, which passed with all votes in favor. The rule directs 95% of net revenue from businesses under the Ethena brand toward buying back ENA tokens.
Standard Chartered calculated that if USDe reaches $40 billion while ENA stays at today’s price, annual buybacks would equal about 23% of the token’s circulating value. The bank views that rate as too high to hold steady, meaning the token price would need to rise for the buybacks to make sense long term.
The bank pointed to Uniswap as a comparison. UNI’s annualized buyback rate settled between 3% and 4% after its fee switch began in December 2025, and the token has roughly tripled since Standard Chartered began covering it in June.
Not everyone expects the same trajectory. Analyst Altcoin Sherpa wrote on X that ENA “probably goes back to $1 in crazy bullish conditions,” a more conservative outlook than the bank’s $2 call but still pointing toward sizable gains from current levels.
$ENA this probably goes back to $1 in crazy bullish conditions pic.twitter.com/vVHcwh0WVK
— Altcoin Sherpa (@AltcoinSherpa) September 30, 2026
Standard Chartered listed slower growth in yield-bearing stablecoins as the main risk to its forecast. A slowdown in real-world assets moving onto blockchains was named as a secondary risk, since Ethena increasingly depends on those assets for yield.
ENA rose more than 5% following the coverage announcement, trading near $0.26 according to TradingView data. The token is up over 77% in the past month.
The move came as Bitcoin passed $85,000, helped by softer-than-expected PCE inflation data that reduced expectations for an October Fed rate cut.
