Ethena Foundation buys out seed sellers, moves buybacks to a vote
Regulation & Gov ·
Four coordinated changes restructure ENA's token economics, cutting future VC unlock pressure while putting a revenue-funded buyback mechanism before governance.
The Ethena Foundation has bought out the locked token holdings of certain major seed investors who sold any ENA within the past nine months, according to an announcement posted by the foundation and reported by wublockchain.xyz. The move is one of four changes disclosed together, aimed at tightening the link between the ENA token and the value generated by the Ethena protocol.
Alongside the buyout, the Ethena Foundation and Ethena Labs signed a Master Framework Agreement assigning intellectual property and protocol value exclusively to the Foundation, which is governed by token holders. Under the agreement, equity investors in the Labs entity are entitled to no residual cash flow from that value.
A separate governance proposal, now live, would activate a fee switch so that net revenue collected across all business lines under the Ethena brand is used to programmatically buy back ENA tokens. The proposal has already cleared review by the Risk Committee before going to a token holder vote, as detailed in the announcement on X.
The fourth change eliminates future monthly unlocks tied to VC investors: the Foundation and lead investors agreed to release those unvested tokens now rather than let them vest on the original monthly schedule, removing that overhang from future supply. Team token vesting is unaffected and continues on its original schedule.
The revenue buyback plan has been described elsewhere in the cluster as tied to a 12% increase in ENA's value, though the mechanics linking the fee switch to that figure are not detailed in the material available. Four distinct sources are tracking the announcement, but the outcome of the governance vote on the fee switch, and the scale of tokens involved in the seed-investor buyout, have not yet been disclosed.