The exchange’s venture arm bought ENA tokens directly on the open market rather than through a private round, the first such disclosed purchase, alongside a partnership to push Ethena’s onchain dollar and savings products into Coinbase’s userbase.
Coinbase Ventures has bought ENA tokens on the open market rather than through a discounted private round, the venture arm’s first such disclosed purchase, as the parent exchange and synthetic-dollar issuer Ethena announced a separate partnership to push onchain finance and savings products to Coinbase’s userbase.
Ethena disclosed both moves in a post on its official X account Tuesday, saying the two companies “have partnered to grow onchain finance and savings products” for Coinbase’s “100m+ userbase,” with “the first growth initiative launching next week.”
The same post said Coinbase Ventures “have also made their first investment into Ethena on the open market.”
Coinbase Ventures confirmed the token purchase on its official X account.
“Coinbase Ventures is proud to back @Ethen through an open market purchase of ENA,” the post said. “Ethena is a critical player in onchain finance, and we are excited for the closer partnership with Coinbase and USDC.”
The Open-Market Posture
Coinbase Ventures, founded in 2018, has logged over 600 investments across crypto and web3, according to its website, almost all of them seed or early-stage private rounds where the venture arm participates alongside other firms. Buying a publicly traded token on a secondary market is a signal as it leaves Coinbase Ventures aligned with ENA holders on float and price rather than with a cap-table preference stack.
The distribution side of the deal opens the protocol’s two flagship assets — the USDe synthetic dollar and the staked, yield-bearing sUSDe — at a user base that, by Coinbase’s own historical disclosures, crossed 100 million verified accounts in 2022 and has grown since. Coinbase reported $294 billion in assets on platform at the end of the first quarter, the largest custodian balance in the industry.
Ethena’s Numbers Going In
Ethena holds about $5.4 billion in total value locked, of which the USDe contract accounts for roughly $4.5 billion, per DefiLlama. The protocol is running at $178 million in annualized fees and has produced $972 million in cumulative fees and $332 million in cumulative protocol revenue since 2023, when Ethena Labs was founded by Guy Young. ENA, the governance token, has a market capitalization of $859 million and a fully diluted valuation of $1.4 billion.
The token reacted within minutes of the news, and it’s up 7.6% in the past 24 hours. DefiLlama showed 24-hour ENA trading volume of $168 million, with on-chain volume of $178 million on Uniswap V3 and Aerodrome, heavier than centralized-exchange flow and consistent with a coordinated bid into the news.
What’s Not Yet Disclosed
Ethena did not say how many ENA tokens Coinbase Ventures bought or at what price, and there has been no on-chain disclosure of the buying wallets. Neither side has named the product that will launch next week, and Coinbase already serves as primary custodian for ENA held by the Ethena Labs core team and Foundation under a prior multi-product agreement with Coinbase Prime, so custodial flow alone is not new.
