Guy Young has quietly built one of crypto’s most consequential backbones — and in just two years. Named to CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 list, the Ethena Labs founder and CEO turned a concept inspired in part by BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes into a roughly $15 billion protocol. Young did it by moving fast and broad: striking distribution deals across exchanges and on‑chain venues and pushing Ethena’s synthetic dollar, USDe, and its yield-bearing counterpart, sUSDe, into every nook of the market. What Ethena created is more than another stablecoin. It helped forge a new category of tokens — “yieldcoins” — that sit where DeFi rails meet TradFi basis trades. By packaging popular hedge-fund strategies, most notably the ETH/BTC basis trade, into a $1-denominated on‑chain instrument, Ethena opened a once-specialized trade to anyone with a wallet. That democratization of yield is what Nick Van Eck, founder of stablecoin protocol AUSD, says could mark the start of a new era in crypto-native asset management — one where yield is the primary product. Van Eck estimates that opportunity could grow into a $500 billion to $1 trillion business line over the coming decade-plus. Young didn’t stop at yieldcoins. Ethena has pushed into the booming stablecoin issuance space, positioning itself against larger incumbents such as Stripe and Circle. The protocol now underpins efforts by projects like MegaETH, Sui and Solana-based Jupiter to launch their own dollar-pegged tokens on top of Ethena infrastructure. With stablecoins continuing to be one of the most important on‑chain use cases, Ethena’s move makes it a central player in how digital dollars proliferate across blockchains. In short: Guy Young turned a niche idea into a systemically important piece of crypto plumbing — expanding access to yield strategies and helping power the next generation of stablecoins. The result is a protocol that’s reshaping how yield and money flow through the crypto ecosystem. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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