Most Influential: Guy Young

AI Summary3 min read

TL;DR

Guy Young, founder of Ethena Labs, built a $15 billion protocol in two years, creating yieldcoins and expanding into stablecoin issuance. Ethena's USDe and sUSDe brought onchain yield and basis trades to mainstream users, potentially unlocking a trillion-dollar market.

Key Takeaways

•Guy Young scaled Ethena Labs from an idea to a $15 billion protocol in just two years by aggressively expanding partnerships and products.
•Ethena created a new category of 'yieldcoins' like USDe and sUSDe, bringing DeFi yield and TradFi basis trades fully onchain for wallet users.
•The protocol is entering the stablecoin issuance business, helping projects like MegaETH and Solana-based Jupiter launch their own dollar tokens.
•Analysts suggest Ethena's model could grow into a $500 billion to $1 trillion business line over the next decade-plus.
•Ethena's infrastructure enables crypto-native asset management with yield as the primary product, challenging traditional finance giants.

In a cycle obsessed with memecoins and dog tokens, Ethena Labs founder and CEO Guy Young built one of the biggest and most systemically important pieces of crypto plumbing.

This feature is a part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025 list.

In just two years, Young scaled Ethena from an idea — admittedly taking inspiration from BitMEX co-founder and crypto guru Arthur Hayes — into a $15 billion protocol by expanding aggressively, cutting distribution partnerships across exchanges and onchain venues, pushing its synthetic dollar USDe and yield-bearing sUSDe into every corner of the market. The result was a new category of digital tokens, or yieldcoins, that lives at the intersection of DeFi rails and TradFi basis trades.

Nick Van Eck, founder of stablecoin protocol AUSD, argued recently that Ethena effectively kicked off a new era of crypto-native asset management, with yield being the main product. Ethena brought yield fully onchain, opening up a popular hedge fund trade — the ETH/BTC basis 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 business line over the next decade-plus.

Then, Young took Ethena one step further, entering the booming stablecoin issuance business and taking up the gloves against giants like Stripe and Circle. Ethena is helping crypto projects like MegaETH, Sui and Solana-based Jupiter spin up their own digital dollar tokens on top of Ethena’s infrastructure, as stablecoins continue to break into the mainstream as one of the biggest use cases for blockchains.

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Exodus is launching a fully reserved, USD-backed stablecoin with MoonPay to power self-custodial payments in its crypto wallet app.
The stablecoin will support Exodus Pay, a new feature enabling users to spend and send digital dollars without relying on centralized exchanges.
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