In a cycle obsessed with memecoins and dog tokens, Ethena Labs founder and CEO Guy Young built one of the largest and most systemically important pieces of crypto plumbing.
This feature is part of CoinDesk List of the most influential of 2025.
In just two years, Young transformed Ethena from an idea (no doubt inspired by BitMEX co-founder and cryptocurrency guru Arthur Hayes) to a $15 billion protocol by aggressively expanding, eliminating distribution partnerships on exchanges and on-chain venues, pushing his synthetic dollar USDe and yield-bearing sUSDe to all corners of the market. The result was a new category of digital tokens, or performance coins, that sit at the intersection of DeFi rails and core TradFi operations.
Nick Van Eck, founder of stablecoin protocol AUSD, recently argued that Ethena effectively ushered in a new era of crypto-native asset management, with performance being the core product. Ethena brought fully on-chain performance, opening up a popular hedge fund trade (the ETH/BTC base trade) to anyone with a wallet, wrapped in a simple $1 denominated instrument. If Van Eck is right, this could be a $500 billion to $1 trillion line of business over the next decade.
Young then took Ethena a step further, entering the booming stablecoin issuance business and taking on giants like Stripe and Circle. Ethena is helping crypto projects like MegaETH, Sui, and Solana-based Jupiter generate their own digital dollar tokens on top of Ethena’s infrastructure, as stablecoins continue to become one of the most important use cases for blockchains.
