- ENA is up roughly 40% in a day and more than 50% over the past week, trading near $0.13 after months spent close to a record low.
- The rally follows a $1 billion lending facility Ethena and FalconX announced on Aug. 19 to diversify how USDe, Ethena’s synthetic dollar, earns its yield.
- BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, a founding Ethena investor through his family office Maelstrom, called ENA a “5 bagger” on X after a wallet linked to him added roughly $2 million of the token.
Ethena’s ENA token is trading near $0.13, up more than 50% for the week and about 40% in the past 24 hours alone, since Ethena Labs and the trading firm FalconX said on Aug. 19 they would route $1 billion of the assets backing Ethena’s USDe stablecoin into a new institutional lending facility.
That deal is real. It does not fully explain a move this fast. Most of the sharpest part of the rally lines up with a single social media post, not the deal itself. Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder, wrote on X that “an $ENA 5 bagger is just too easy,” pointing to a chart target near $0.50.
The loudest bull has a stake
Hayes is not a bystander calling this from the sidelines. Maelstrom, the family office he runs, co-led Ethena’s founding funding round in 2023 alongside Brevan Howard Digital and Franklin Templeton. A wallet linked to him by on-chain trackers added about 22.64 million ENA, worth roughly $2 million, in the days before his post. None of this is hidden. Both the fund’s stake and the wallet activity are public. But it means the loudest voice behind this week’s move is a founding investor talking about a token he just bought more of, not an outside analyst.
The FalconX facility itself is narrower than the price reaction suggests. It lets FalconX originate and manage collateralized loans using assets that already back USDe, giving Ethena a return stream beyond the crypto funding rates USDe normally depends on. “Secured institutional lending is one of the largest and most durable sources of return in finance, and on-chain capital has barely touched it,” Ethena Labs founder Guy Young said in the announcement. Neither he nor FalconX put a number on how much that changes USDe’s yield, and nothing in the announcement mentions the ENA token at all. The deal is about how USDe earns money. The 50% move is happening in ENA.
A pattern in his own trades
A tally of 124 trades since December 2023, across three wallets that the blockchain analytics firm Arkham attributes to Hayes, points to a specific pattern worth knowing before reading too much into any single call he makes.
ENA itself has spent most of 2026 grinding lower. It traded above $0.21 in January, then fell to a record low near $0.07 to $0.08 around July 1, ahead of a scheduled 40.6-million-token unlock, the kind of supply event that has repeatedly capped the token’s price this year. This week is the first time that trend has reversed sharply.
Whether it holds is the actual test here, and it is a specific one. If the wallet tracked back to Hayes trims its ENA position over the next month or two, that would match the pattern his own trading history shows. If it doesn’t, and ENA holds this range, the FalconX facility will have been the real story after all.
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