Over the past year, Crypto Neobank has gradually become one of the most important consumer-facing applications of stablecoins.

Stablecoins have already solved part of the problems of global dollar accounts, cross-border transfers, and on-chain savings, while the spread of crypto bank cards has further brought on-chain assets into everyday consumption scenarios. Blockworks data shows that in the first week of September, the weekly spending volume of crypto bank cards it tracks reached a record $283 million, up more than 200% year-over-year.

But as more and more projects begin to launch "stablecoin accounts + bank cards," the focus of industry competition has also begun to shift.

Issuing a card itself is no longer difficult. What truly determines whether a Crypto Neobank can break out is whether it can acquire users at a sufficiently low cost and continuously generate revenue from the funds users leave deposited over the long term.

This is exactly where Ethena Pay is worth watching.

Ethena Pay's advantage is not just having one more bank card

The revenue structure of traditional Crypto Neobanks is usually not complicated.

Users deposit USDC or USDT into an account and spend through a bank card, and the platform earns an interchange fee from the payment process, that is, a share of bank card transaction fees. To attract users, platforms often also need to allocate a considerable portion of that to cashback, rewards, and subsidies, and then further increase revenue per user through trading, lending, subscriptions, and other businesses.

The biggest problem with this model is that the most important part of the economic value in user accounts does not belong to the Neobank itself.

If users hold USDC, the interest generated by the underlying reserve assets is mainly captured by Circle; if they use USDT, the related yield is mainly captured by Tether. For financial applications built on stablecoins, although users stay within their own products, a large portion of the yield generated by user funds is still taken by upstream stablecoin issuers.

Ethena Pay starts from a different point. Funds entering Ethena Pay are converted into USDe, so from the moment users complete their deposit, these funds enter Ethena's own stablecoin system and begin contributing to underlying asset revenue.

This means that Ethena not only controls payments and the consumer entry point, but also owns the economic returns generated by the stablecoin itself. This may seem like merely a difference in revenue structure, but for a financial business, it is far from insignificant.

Data cited by Blockworks shows that net interest income accounted for approximately 34% of Robinhood's 2025 revenue, while interest income accounted for approximately 22% of Revolut's revenue. For financial platforms, what is truly valuable is not just the money users "spend"—the funds users keep in their accounts over the long term are also an important source of revenue.

Ethena's advantage is that it does not need to give up this portion of revenue entirely to third-party stablecoin issuers or partner banks.

After deducting the yield paid to users and operating costs, the remaining revenue can be reinvested into the product to increase cashback, lower fees, subsidize user growth, or develop more financial services.

Therefore, Ethena Pay's competitiveness is not just about "whether it can offer a usable card," but about the fact that it may have a better unit economics model than an ordinary Crypto Neobank.

From a payment product to a consumer distribution channel for USDe

Looking further, Ethena Pay's value to Ethena may not just be the addition of a new business line. Its more important role is to become a new distribution channel for USDe.

In the past, demand for USDe mainly came from DeFi, trading, and yield strategies. Users used USDe essentially because of on-chain yield and capital efficiency. Ethena Pay, by contrast, is trying to bring in another category of funds: everyday savings, transfers, and consumer account balances.

If consumers begin holding funds through Ethena Pay, those funds will naturally convert into USDe supply. As USDe scales up, Ethena can generate more underlying revenue; higher revenue in turn can support better cashback, rates, and user rewards, which helps Ethena Pay continue to scale.

In this way, a mutually reinforcing growth loop could form between Pay and USDe.

This is also what makes Ethena's business model more interesting than that of an ordinary Crypto Neobank. For many payment platforms, the payments business and stablecoin issuance belong to two different profit pools: the app is responsible for acquiring users, while the stablecoin issuer is responsible for earning reserve yield.

Ethena, by contrast, wants to put these two layers of economic value into the same system. If this model can work, Ethena Pay will no longer be just an application on top of USDe, but will in turn become an important channel driving USDe's expansion.

However, for now this is still more of an attractive business model than a growth flywheel that has been validated by the market.

As of Blockworks' September 15 article, Ethena Pay's weekly card spending had just hit a new high of about $250,000, with 456 funded accounts holding a combined balance of about $4.3 million, and the product was still in invite-only mode. By comparison, EtherFi's weekly card spending had already reached about $30 million.

This means there is still a scale gap of two orders of magnitude between the two.

Therefore, what is most worth watching about Ethena Pay at this stage is not its growth data, but whether it can truly translate its theoretical economic advantages into user growth, lower customer acquisition costs, and higher retention. Consumer finance has never been a market where you can win on back-end yield alone. Product experience, payment networks, regional coverage, compliance capabilities, and user trust will also determine the final outcome.

The change for ENA is that revenue is finally starting to have a relationship with the token

If Ethena Pay changes the source of USDe's growth, then the recently passed fee switch is beginning to change the relationship between ENA and the entire Ethena business system.

Previously, one of the biggest controversies in the market regarding ENA was that although Ethena could generate protocol revenue, there was not a sufficiently direct connection between that revenue and ENA holders.

The new fee switch is attempting to solve this problem. According to the governance proposal, the ENA buyback will not be initiated immediately, but will be tied to the scale of USDe supply. The first trigger threshold is $7.5 billion.

Once USDe supply reaches this level, the protocol will begin extracting a certain proportion of revenue for ENA buybacks; as USDe further grows to $10 billion, $15 billion, and $20 billion, the corresponding revenue extraction ratio will continue to increase. Among these, the first threshold of $7.5 billion corresponds to a 5% take rate.

This makes ENA's value logic more interpretable for the first time. In the past, USDe growth first meant Ethena protocol revenue growth, but this revenue could not necessarily be passed directly to ENA. In the future, if USDe reaches the fee switch trigger threshold, a more direct economic link will be established between protocol growth and ENA. And the emergence of Ethena Pay adds another layer of consumer growth source to this logic.

If Pay can acquire users and accumulate more funds, USDe's supply may expand accordingly; if USDe's scale continues to grow and crosses the $7.5 billion threshold, a portion of protocol revenue will further enter the ENA buyback mechanism.

As of Blockworks' article publication on September 15, USDe supply was approximately $4.6 billion, having recorded net inflows for six consecutive weeks, while also just expanding to TRON. In other words, although the fee switch has been approved, ENA's programmatic buyback has not yet truly been initiated.

This is also why, at this stage, when discussing ENA, the more accurate statement is not "value capture has been completed," but rather that it has begun to possess a clearer path to value capture.

Ethena's story is moving from stablecoin to financial platform

In the past, the market's understanding of Ethena typically revolved around two questions. First, whether USDe can continue to expand its scale. Second, whether its underlying yield model can remain stable across different market environments.

Now, Ethena is adding a third layer of logic to this story: consumer financial distribution. If Ethena Pay can ultimately achieve scale, Ethena will no longer rely solely on traders and DeFi users to use USDe, but will have the opportunity to capture more long-term and more stable consumer account balances.

At the same time, the fee switch is once again linking protocol growth to ENA's value capture. Therefore, what truly warrants a market reassessment of Ethena Pay is not that it has launched yet another crypto bank card.

More importantly, Ethena is attempting to put consumer entry points, stablecoin scale, protocol revenue, and token value into a single business model. The consumer business is responsible for acquiring funds, USDe is responsible for absorbing those funds and generating revenue, and ENA is beginning to have a more clearly defined value capture mechanism. This logic is far more complete than the previous narrative that revolved solely around a "high-yield stablecoin."

But it still has two premises that must be verified.

Ethena Pay first needs to prove that it can grow from a small-scale invite-only product into a truly competitive consumer finance platform; USDe also needs to continue expanding its scale and genuinely cross the $7.5 billion threshold before the ENA buyback mechanism can move from governance documents into actual operation.

Therefore, rather than saying ENA has already completed its revaluation, it is more accurate to say that Ethena is building a new valuation framework.

The commercial closed loop has already begun to emerge, but whether this flywheel can truly start spinning will still depend on Ethena Pay's user growth, USDe's supply expansion, and when the ENA fee switch ultimately enters the actual execution phase.

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