Coinbase unveils Ethena investment in ‘onchain finance’ expansion push

Coinbase Ventures has purchased ENA tokens on the open market and announced a partnership with Ethena to build onchain savings products for more than 100 million combined users.

Cryptopolitan has previously reported on Coinbase’s growing presence in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, where the exchange took over as the official USDC treasury deployer and acquired the USDH brand assets from Native Markets in May.

The deal with Ethena is Coinbase’s latest move to expand its footprint across decentralized finance protocols, and this time around, it is synthetic dollar infrastructure.

What does the partnership include?

Coinbase Ventures wrote on X that “Ethena is a critical player in onchain finance,” adding that they are looking forward to a closer partnership between Ethena and both Coinbase and USDC.

The collaboration targets onchain finance and savings products aimed at their combined user base, which runs up to over 100 million, with Ethena stating that the first growth initiative from the partnership will launch next week. However, neither side specified what the product would be.

Also, both parties in the deal did not disclose the size of the ENA purchase or the financial terms of the partnership.

Ethena’s position in DeFi

Ethena operates a synthetic dollar protocol on Ethereum. The project holds around $5.4 billion in total value locked, according to DeFiLlama data, placing it among the larger DeFi protocols by that metric.

The protocol has generated approximately $983 million in cumulative fees since launch.

At some point on June 2, ENA traded at around $0.097, a jump of over 10% from the prior 24 hours. The token is currently trading at $0.091 and has a market capitalization of over $825 million, with 9 billion of its 15 billion total supply in circulation.

Ethena has gone through multiple funding rounds, raising a total of $166 million from various backers, including Franklin Templeton, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and Binance Labs, per DeFiLlama records.

Coinbase’s expansion pattern

Coinbase has pursued similar partnerships this year as it became the sole USDC treasury deployer on Hyperliquid after Circle’s stablecoin was designated as the Aligned Quote Asset on the trading platform.

That arrangement with Hyperliquid gave Coinbase a major role in a network that processes over $176 billion in monthly perpetual futures volume.

In March, Coinbase also launched 24/7 stock perpetual futures offering synthetic exposure to the Magnificent 7 tech stocks for international traders.

According to the exchange, these moves are part of its push to make USDC the default settlement layer for onchain capital markets.

Compass Point analysts estimated that the Hyperliquid USDC deal could redirect $60 million to $80 million in annual EBITDA away from Circle and Coinbase combined, as Hyperliquid captures most of the reserve income from USDC deposits on its platform.

It is not yet known if Ethena’s partnership will follow a similar revenue-sharing structure or takes a different form.