Ethena Expands Ecosystem With Launch of Self-Custodial Money App

Ethena (ENA) has officially launched Ethena Pay, a self-custodial money app the project bills as “the internet money neobank,” advertising a 6% dollar savings rate, 5% card cashback.

It even has free transfers across roughly 50 countries at launch. It also comes with dollar savings, card spending, international transfers and free onramps in dollars, pounds and euros, with fiat account numbers tied to self-custodial stablecoin wallets.

Though access starts with 400 early users and expands weekly through a September beta. Notably, Avalanche (AVAX) is the exclusive settlement network, and a feature called Buy Now Pay Never puts savings rewards toward purchases without touching the principal.

Tiers and Caps

As mentioned, Ethena’s card cashback is at a flat 5%. The product page breaks it into tiers: the free Standard plan pays 4% on spending with cashback capped at $100 a month, while the Pro and VIP plans lift the monthly caps to $360 and $1,000, with 5% reserved for the top tier.

Savings follow the same pattern: Standard accounts earn 5%, upper tiers get the advertised 6%, and rewards pay out daily. A footnote says the rates rest on Ethena-reported weekly data and assume no net staking activity during reward vesting.

Users can generate a virtual Visa card in under a minute, spend it at more than 130 million merchants, and add it to Apple Pay, with Google Pay to follow. Third National issues the card under license from Visa, with program management from Signify Holdings, operating as Rain.

The card is not offered to US persons, and users must be 18 to register. Transfers between Ethena Pay users are free, with no monthly account fees, and euro, yen, and Brazilian real accounts are listed as coming soon.

Not a Bank, Though

Ethena Pay Ltd, incorporated in Malta, has clearly stated that it is not a bank, holds no customer funds, and provides fiat account numbers through licensed banking partners, while wallet keys stay with the user behind passkeys and biometrics.

Moreover, the official site flags that balances carry no coverage from the FDIC, the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme or Malta’s depositor scheme, and the savings rate flows from the yield engine behind USDe, Ethena’s synthetic dollar, which has drawn its returns from a crypto basis trade.

USDe’s circulating supply stands near $4.2 billion, per DefiLlama, and Ethena says it has paid holders more than $750 million in rewards on over $30 billion of mints and redemptions. Ethena has widened its lineup before, launching USDtb, a stablecoin backed primarily by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.

ENA, which recorded its biggest single day of network growth in more than three months in May after Grayscale added the token to its DeFi Fund, traded 8.6% higher on launch day, per CoinGecko.