TL;DR
The core advantage of Ethena Pay is not just card issuance, but the ability to directly channel user funds into USDe while gaining access to payment channels and underlying stablecoin yields.
This gives Ethena the opportunity to reinvest more of its revenue into cashback, fees, and user growth, while making Pay a new consumer distribution channel for USDe.
· With the ENA fee switch approved, USDe's growth has begun to more directly align with ENA buybacks, making ENA's value capture pathway clearer. However, this business闭环 is still in its early stages.
Ethena Pay is currently limited in scale; what truly needs to be validated is whether the consumer business can achieve significant scale and whether USDe can reach the $7.5 billion threshold required to trigger buybacks.

Over the past year, Crypto Neobank has gradually become one of the most important consumer-facing applications for stablecoins.

Stablecoins have addressed part of the global U.S. dollar account, cross-border transfer, and on-chain savings challenges, while the growing adoption of crypto debit cards has further integrated on-chain assets into everyday spending. According to Blockworks data, during the first week of September, weekly spending on the crypto debit cards it tracks reached a record $283 million, representing over 200% year-over-year growth.

However, as more projects begin to launch "stablecoin accounts + debit cards," the focus of industry competition is also shifting.

Issuing a card itself is no longer difficult. What truly determines whether a crypto neobank can succeed is its ability to acquire users at a low enough cost and generate ongoing revenue from users' long-term deposited funds.

This is exactly why Ethena Pay is worth paying attention to.

The advantages of Ethena Pay go far beyond just adding another debit card.

The revenue structure of traditional crypto neobanks is typically not complex.

Users deposit USDC or USDT into their accounts and make purchases using their bank cards; the platform earns an interchange fee—the portion of the card transaction fee. To attract users, the platform often allocates a significant portion of this fee toward cashback, rewards, and subsidies, then further increases per-user revenue through trading, lending, subscriptions, and other services.

The biggest issue with this model is that the most important portion of economic value in users' accounts does not belong to the neobank itself.

If users hold USDC, the interest generated by its underlying reserve assets is primarily earned by Circle; if they use USDT, the related earnings are primarily captured by Tether. For financial applications built on stablecoins, although users remain within the platform, a significant portion of the earnings generated by the users' funds is still captured by the upstream stablecoin issuers.

Ethena Pay starts differently. Funds deposited into Ethena Pay are converted into USDe, meaning that from the moment a user completes their deposit, those funds enter Ethena’s own stablecoin system and begin generating income from the underlying assets.

This means that Ethena not only controls payments and consumer access but also captures the economic returns generated by the stablecoin itself. While this may seem like a mere difference in revenue structure, it holds significant implications for financial businesses.

According to Blockworks, net interest income accounted for approximately 34% of Robinhood’s 2025 revenue, while interest income made up about 22% of Revolut’s revenue. For financial platforms, the true value lies not only in the money users spend, but also in the funds users keep in their accounts over time, which serve as a significant revenue source.

Ethena's advantage lies in not having to fully surrender this yield to third-party stablecoin issuers or partner banks.

After deducting user rewards and operational costs, the remaining revenue can be reinvested into the product to increase cashback, reduce fees, subsidize user growth, or develop additional financial services.

Therefore, Ethena Pay’s competitiveness isn’t just about “whether it can offer a useful card,” but rather whether it may have a better unit economics model than traditional crypto neobanks.

From payment products to consumer distribution channels for USDe

Looking further, Ethena Pay may not just add a new business line to Ethena; its more significant role is serving as a new distribution channel for USDe.

In the past, demand for USDe primarily came from DeFi, trading, and yield strategies. Users adopted USDe largely because of on-chain yields and capital efficiency. Ethena Pay aims to bring in another category of funds: everyday savings, transfers, and checking account balances.

If consumers begin holding funds through Ethena Pay, those funds will naturally convert into USDe supply. As the USDe supply grows, Ethena can generate more underlying income; higher income, in turn, enables better cashback, lower fees, and enhanced user rewards, helping Ethena Pay continue to scale.

This could create a mutually reinforcing growth cycle between Pay and USDe.

This is also what makes Ethena’s business model more interesting compared to traditional crypto neobanks. For many payment platforms, payment processing and stablecoin issuance belong to two distinct profit pools: the application handles user acquisition, while the stablecoin issuer captures reserve yields.

Ethena aims to integrate these two layers of economic value into a single system. If this model succeeds, Ethena Pay will no longer be merely an application built on top of USDe, but will instead become a key driver of USDe's expansion.

However, this is still primarily an attractive business model rather than a proven growth engine validated by the market.

As of Blockworks’ article on September 15, Ethena Pay’s weekly debit card spending had just reached a new high of approximately $250,000, with 456 funded accounts holding a combined balance of about $4.3 million; the product remains in invite-only mode. In comparison, EtherFi’s weekly debit card spending has already reached approximately $30 million.

This means there is still a two-order-of-magnitude difference in scale between the two.

Therefore, what matters most for Ethena Pay at this stage is not its growth metrics, but whether it can truly translate its theoretical economic advantages into user growth, lower customer acquisition costs, and higher retention. Consumer finance has never been a market won solely by backend yields. Product experience, payment networks, regional coverage, compliance capabilities, and user trust are equally critical in determining the final outcome.

The change with ENA is that revenue has finally begun to relate to the token.

If Ethena Pay changed the source of growth for USDe, the recently approved fee switch now begins to alter the relationship between ENA and the entire Ethena business ecosystem.

One of the biggest criticisms of ENA in the past was that, although Ethena generates protocol revenue, there was insufficient direct linkage between this revenue and ENA holders.

The new fee switch is designed to address this issue. According to the governance proposal, ENA buybacks will not begin immediately but will be tied to the size of the USDe supply. The first trigger threshold is set at $7.5 billion.

Once the USDe supply reaches this level, the protocol will begin extracting a portion of revenue for ENA buybacks at a specified rate; as USDe grows further to $10 billion, $15 billion, and $20 billion, the revenue extraction rate will continue to increase. The first threshold of $7.5 billion corresponds to a 5% take rate.

This makes the value proposition of ENA more understandable for the first time. Previously, growth in USDe primarily meant increased revenue for the Ethena protocol, but this revenue did not necessarily flow directly to ENA. In the future, if USDe reaches the fee switch threshold, a more direct economic link will be established between protocol growth and ENA. Additionally, the introduction of Ethena Pay adds another layer of consumer-driven growth to this logic.

If Pay can acquire users and retain more funds, the supply of USDe may expand accordingly; if the size of USDe continues to grow and surpasses the $7.5 billion threshold, a portion of the protocol's revenue will further enter the ENA buyback mechanism.

As of Blockworks' article on September 15, the circulating supply of USDe was approximately $4.6 billion, having recorded six consecutive weeks of net inflows and just expanded to TRON. This means that although the fee switch has been approved, ENA’s programmatic buybacks have not yet been genuinely activated.

This is why, at this stage, a more accurate way to discuss ENA is not that "value capture has been completed," but rather that it has begun to develop a clearer path to value capture.

Ethena's story is evolving from a stablecoin into a financial platform.

In the past, market understanding of Ethena typically revolved around two key questions: whether USDe could sustainably scale, and whether its underlying yield model could remain stable across different market conditions.

Now, Ethena is adding a third layer to this narrative: consumer financial distribution. If Ethena Pay eventually achieves scale, Ethena will no longer rely solely on traders and DeFi users adopting USDe, but will have the opportunity to acquire more long-term and stable consumer account balances.

Meanwhile, the fee switch has once again linked protocol growth to ENA's value capture. Therefore, what truly warrants market reassessment about Ethena Pay is not its launch of another crypto debit card.

More importantly, Ethena is attempting to integrate consumer acquisition, stablecoin scale, protocol revenue, and token value into a single business model. The consumer business drives capital inflow, USDe absorbs this capital and generates revenue, while ENA begins to exhibit a clearer mechanism for value capture. This logic is far more comprehensive than previous narratives centered solely on “high-yield stablecoins.”

But it still has two prerequisites that must be verified.

Ethena Pay must first prove that it can grow from a small, invite-only product into a truly competitive consumer finance platform; USDe also needs to continue scaling to truly surpass the $7.5 billion threshold, so that the ENA buyback mechanism can move from governance documentation into actual operation.

Therefore, rather than saying ENA has been revalued, it is more accurate to say that Ethena is building a new valuation framework.

A business feedback loop has begun to emerge, but whether this flywheel can truly gain momentum will depend on Ethena Pay’s user growth, the expansion of USDe supply, and the eventual timing of the ENA fee switch’s implementation.