Metrics used: Social Volume, Sentiment Balance, Trading Volume, Open Interest, Total Supply, Active Addresses

Chart layouts used: onchain, social, USDe

ENA has been one of the best performing mid- to large- cap tokens during the latest market rally. Price went from roughly 8 cent to almost 20 at the peak. As it usually goes, price rally brought onchain and social activity along with it.

The hype is clearly there: address activity roughly 3x'ed, trading volume went up 10x, social volume went from 3-5 mentions per day to 50-60 at the peak, and sentiment flipped from deeply negative to slightly positive. Open interest measured in coins also rose a few dozen % initially, although as the price started ranging it swiftly went back to baseline.

What is even more interesting is the heavy-hitting announcements that the team made following the price rise: NASDAQ-related here, fee switch + investor buyback here, and Ethena Pay here. And the timing on those couldn't have been more peculiar.

Almost to the exact hour those massive announcements ended up marking 3 local tops after the run up. Could that be the team reacting to the price? Unlikely, as such things take months to prepare. Could those announcements have been frontran by people in the know? Maybe. Overall, it once again proves the golden rule of behavioural finance - price tops on great news and bottoms on terrible news.

Another important notice about the hyped fee switch - it might not be as great as advertised. As pinpointed by Laura Shin, the fee switch requires USDe to expand significantly first, with the first 5% of revenue directed for buybacks only when USDe gets above 7.5B total supply.

The blockchain shows that the way to 7.5B is not going to be easy. USDe supply has been all but shrinking for the past year, with holder count growth stalling.

And on top of that, the buybacks will be coming out of the revenue, meaning less yield for staked USDe holders. And the yield isn't that juicy even before that.

As you can see from the sUSDe dynamics - yes, the coin is steadily accruing value, but the accrual rate is quite slow, only around 3% YTD which is on par with US treasury rates. But more importantly, only around 1/4 of all USDe is currently staked. If that number was to increase to include the entire supply, APY would drop to around 1% (before any buybacks kick in). That puts USDe stakers into a direct conflict of interest with the ENA holders.

Finishing this thing off with a brief conclusion - time and time again we are reminded that a well timed announcement is the greatest weapon in the arsenal of a crypto project:)