Guy Young is the CEO and Founder of Ethena Labs, the crypto infrastructure company building USDe, a fully-backed on-chain stablecoin powered by the ETH staking yield and perpetual swaps. ^[1][2]

Career

Prior to Ethena, Guy Young spent nearly a decade working in the traditional finance industry across investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity firms. He worked at Cerberus Capital Management, a $50bn investment fund from 2016 to 2022 leading the firm’s expansion into Australian markets and overseeing strategic investments across banking, specialty finance, insurance, fintech, and more. ^[1][3]

Ethena Labs

Guy Young founded Ethena Labs in 2023. Ethena Labs is a decentralized protocol developed on the Ethereum blockchain. Its purpose is to offer a crypto-based alternative to traditional banking systems. The protocol introduces a globally accessible and permissionless savings instrument known as the 'Internet Bond,' (USDe) denominated in dollars. ^[2]

In March 2023, Arthur Hayes wrote an article named ‘Dust on Crust‘^[4] in which he talked about the rise of stablecoins and the purpose of these amongst traders and market makers. He then presented the idea of an on-chain fully decentralized stablecoin called “The Satoshi Nakamoto Dollar“ backed by equal amounts of spot long and futures short BTC exposure creating a delta-neutral one-to-one backed synthetic dollar. Guy was inspired by the post and started working on Ethena USDe:

"...I read his [Arthur Hayes] piece, was inspired by the vision and the way he thought about things, and decided to quit my job to start building out Athena on the back of that..." - Guy Young on his motivation behind developing Ethena Labs^[5]

Ethena Labs is backed by crypto-focused venture capital firm Dragonfly, Wintermute, OKX Ventures, and investors like Cobie, Arthur Hayes, and Anthony Sassano. In July 2023, Ethena raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Dragonfly with participation from BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes and his family office, Maelstrom. ^[6][7]

“We want to separate the most important instrument in crypto, which is the stablecoin, from the banking system. The point of everything we're trying to do is to create a self sufficient system, and yet the most important asset is completely centralized” - Guy Young on plans for the stablecoin project. ^[5]

USDe

Ethena USDe (labeled as 'internet bond') is a fully-backed on-chain stablecoin powered by the ETH staking yield and perpetual swaps. The issuance and redemption of USDe is managed by Ethena Labs. ^[7]

USDe is collateralized 1:1 by ETH LSTs like stETH from Lido while this exposure is hedged on perpetual futures by shorting the equivalent amount of ETH. As this generates a high yield, USDe is being labeled as ‘the internet bond‘. USDe was developed to solve the stablecoin trilemma that states that a stablecoin can’t maintain a peg to the underlying asset, can't be decentralized, and can't be scalable. ^[5]

“The philosophy around the product is to try and make it as secure and safe at the base layer as possible. There are interesting things that you can start to do with leverage to try and juice up the returns in some ways, but we really just want to create a solid base which other people can go and build upon and start to use leverage in other interesting ways, whether that's in money markets or on perp dexs.” - Guy Young stated in an interview^[5]

On future goals for USDe, Young responded:

"Mid to longterm, Ethena plans to integrate USDe into a large variety of DeFi protocols and centralized exchanges in order to grow the supply and create strong utility. Ethena also plans to decentralize the stablecoin further by moving the short positions from centralized exchanges to DEXs." ^[5]