Ethena Drops 3.8% Amid Hack, Unlocks, and Valuation Concerns

Detailed summary

Ethena (ENA) fell 3.8% due to a Binance hack involving 217M ENA, ongoing token unlocks, and valuation pushback. This decline occurs amid a soft macro backdrop for ETH and altcoins.

Ethena (ENA)’s decline of approximately 3.8 percentage points over the last 19 hours is primarily driven by coin-specific supply overhang and hack-related selling pressure, compounded by a soft macro backdrop for ETH and altcoins.

The most significant catalyst is the fallout from a large security incident involving ENA balances held at Binance. Santiment’s analysis highlighted ENA as unusually affected, with 169 active ENA withdrawal addresses in one hour on Oct 29 and about 208.62M ENA in net exchange outflows that day, alongside a report that around 217.5M stolen ENA were converted to ETH via decentralized venues.¹ A widely shared post summarized this as “The Hacker Dumped 217M ENA,” describing that the attacker held about 217M ENA (around 1.6% of total supply) and “sold all of it within hours, swapped into Ethereum.”² Separately, on Nov 6 an identified address 0xfDD was reported to have “dumped over $2m worth of…

Traders were reminded that ENA’s vesting and unlock schedule is far from over. A detailed thread this week pointed out that Ethena “unlocked $24M of new tokens this week,” noting that while investors’ monthly unlocks ended after Ethena released their remaining tokens early on Oct 5, other allocations continue.⁴ Specifically, that analysis highlighted that the team received 93.8M ENA on Nov 5 and the foundation 40.6M ENA on Nov 2, and that these team and foundation unlocks repeat monthly until spring 2028.⁴ CoinMarketCap’s own unlock schedule for Ethena shows a long series of regular unlock events where each upcoming tranche adds about 1.15% of supply at each date, much of it going to…

There is also a growing narrative that Ethena’s token valuation has pulled ahead of fundamentals, given slower growth in its USDe synthetic dollar product. One widely shared analysis noted there had been “a wave of interest in 0x57e114b691db790c35207b2e685d4a43181e6061 and @ethena” built on the story that USDe supply would “rapidly grow back to ATH and beyond,” but that in…

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