Ethena Pay Launched: Why Ethena Built Its Own Money App for USDe

What the app does

"No extra step," Lito Coen says of Ethena Pay: once money is in the app, it earns daily rewards. He says fiat deposits come in one to one, with no FX and zero fees, which he calls the best onramp from fiat into digital dollars. The app launched with a virtual card, and physical cards are planned for later.

Coen says it was the team's biggest product launch in terms of virality, and the problem now is too much demand.

A wallet on hard mode

Lito Coen describes a crypto neobank as everything a crypto wallet is, plus integrated virtual bank accounts and cards. "It's incredibly complex," he says, pointing to vendor integrations, mobile development, design and compliance. He says Ethena Labs has a team of five or six people auditing its code bases internally around the clock.

Owning the user

The plan, according to Lito Coen, is for Ethena Labs to own a larger share of the crypto-native user pool rather than renting distribution. He says the company never lost money in major crypto incidents and has distributed over $750 million in rewards to holders of USDe. He credits founder Guy with the company's rise to $15 billion of assets under management.

Who comes first

Lito Coen thinks Ethena Pay could easily reach 500,000 to a million users from crypto natives alone. Next come digital nomads and people in countries with high inflation. He says Asia has strong demand for fiat rails, so the team is enabling fiat bank transfers from several Asian countries. He has already onboarded people who had never used crypto, with no hiccups at sign-up.