
The Safe Foundation is looking to boost the adoption of one of the largest onchain tokenized dollars, USDe.
On Tuesday, the foundation announced a strategic partnership with USDe issuer Ethena Labs to cut gas costs for USDe transactions on the Ethereum mainnet and boost rewards points earning potential for USDe held in a Safe multisig wallet.
“The collaboration signals a broader strategic initiative by Safe to move the stablecoin economy on self-custodial rails,” the firms wrote. “This partnership formalizes both companies’ commitment to positioning Safe’s self-custodial wallet ecosystem as the preferred platform for accessing Ethena’s products.”
Safe is already a go-to solution for onchain crypto management, particularly for crypto-native teams like DAOs and other enterprises. The platform, spun out of the Gnosis team’s R&D efforts, offers battle-tested security and fully onchain, programmable, and non-custodial smart contract flexibility.
Some $6.6 billion worth of stablecoins are already secured by Safe multisigs, including $65.1 million sUSDe, the yield-bearing staked version of the synthetic stablecoin. This accounts for nearly 85% of all Ethena assets held in Safes, according to Dune data.
Safe accounts holding USDe will now receive a “10x boost multiplier on their accrued points during the current Ethena points program,”
“This alliance will accelerate the integration of USDe into the deepest layers of the DeFi economy,” Guy Young, founder at Ethena Labs, said in a statement.
The USDe model
USDe is a crypto-native synthetic dollar primarily on Ethereum that holds its $1 peg without fiat bank reserves. The asset maintains stability via a delta-neutral strategy, holding long positions in crypto assets like ETH hedged with short-perpetual positions, earning funding rates and basis spreads in the process.
Although Ethena Labs often eschews the “stablecoin” label, it is often grouped with other assets like USDT and USDC — the two largest stablecoins — because it maintains price stability over time. USDe was recently flipped by Sky’s USDS onchain dollar as the third-largest tokenized dollar, according to The Block’s data.
Ethena has been growing its product suite, including efforts to expand its white-glove stablecoin-as-a-service offering, recently tapped by Solana-based Jupiter.
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