Standard Chartered initiates ENA coverage with $2 end-2028 target on USDe-led buybacks

Standard Chartered initiated research coverage of Ethena and its ENA governance token in a report published Wednesday, written by Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research. The bank set a year-end 2028 target of $2 for ENA, about seven times the $0.28 reference price in the report, and forecast $0.42 at end-2026 and $1.10 at end-2027, a path the bank says outpaces its own forecasts for bitcoin and ether. The call rests on the fee switch ENA holders approved on Sept. 8, which directs 95% of net revenue from Ethena's business lines to ENA buybacks and takes nothing until USDe supply reaches $7.5 billion, per a Risk Committee analysis posted with the proposal; USDe supply is about $4.9 billion today. Standard Chartered estimates USDe could reach $40 billion by end-2028 and calculated that at that size, with ENA's price unchanged, buybacks would retire around 23% of tokens a year, which the bank called far too high, so it expects the price to rise until the buyback share settles. Unchained reports USDe was about to pass $10 billion and that Standard Chartered sees Ethena at the intersection of perpetual contracts, tokenization and stablecoins, with USDe the fastest stablecoin to reach that $10 billion mark. Cointelegraph, which received the report Wednesday, says falling returns from USDe's crypto basis trade have pushed Ethena into DeFi and institutional lending, real-world assets, and equity- and commodity-linked basis trades, which together now generate a blended yield of 5.2%, and the bank expects USDe to slightly outpace overall stablecoin market growth. Bitcoin Insider, an aggregator, first reported the initiation citing CryptoBriefing and crypto.news, and described Standard Chartered as one of the first major traditional finance firms to publish a long-term target on a small-cap token, a characterization no other outlet in the set makes. Unclear from the set: what level the buyback share settles at in the bank's own model, and which entity on Ethena's side formally confirmed the report.