In a landscape dominated by memecoins and dog tokens, Guy Young, founder and CEO of Ethena Labs, established one of the most crucial infrastructures in the crypto space.
This feature is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 list.
Within just two years, Young transformed Ethena from a concept — admittedly inspired by BitMEX co-founder and crypto expert Arthur Hayes — into a $15 billion protocol through aggressive expansion, severing distribution agreements with exchanges and on-chain platforms, and launching its synthetic dollar, USDe, along with yield-bearing sUSDe into every corner of the market. The outcome was a novel classification of digital tokens, or yieldcoins, that exist at the crossroads of DeFi infrastructure and TradFi basis trades.
Nick Van Eck, founder of the stablecoin protocol AUSD, recently claimed that Ethena has effectively ushered in a new era of crypto-focused asset management, centered on yield as the primary offering. Ethena successfully brought yield entirely on-chain, democratizing a favored hedge fund strategy — the ETH/BTC basis trade — to anyone with a wallet, encapsulated in a straightforward $1-denominated instrument. If Van Eck’s assertion holds, this could evolve into a $500 billion to $1 trillion business sector over the next decade and beyond.
Young further advanced Ethena by entering the thriving stablecoin issuance market, challenging industry veterans like Stripe and Circle. Ethena is assisting crypto projects, such as MegaETH, as well as Sui and Solana-based Jupiter, in launching their own digital dollar tokens utilizing Ethena’s framework, as stablecoins increasingly emerge as one of the most significant applications for blockchains.
