On January 3, Ethena released the 2025 roadmap "Convergence", where Ethena's next growth will mainly be driven by delivering its products to the traditional finance sector. Next month, Ethena will launch a new product called "iUSDe", aimed at exporting sUSDe to the TradFi space in a regulated form. "iUSDe" is the same as sUSDe but with the addition of a simple wrapper contract, which adds some transfer restrictions at the token level, so that traditional financial entities can hold and use it. This allows traditional finance to efficiently access the product without having to engage with the cryptocurrency space.
Ethena will announce the initial TradFi distribution partners for iUSDe this month. Additionally, Ethena plans to address payment and savings use cases by building dedicated applications in the Telegram and TON ecosystems, including a dedicated use case for sUSDe within the Telegram app, where users can send, spend, and save the token in a mobile banking-like experience.
Beyond its core products, Ethena will continue to transition from a single-asset issuer to a best-in-class builder, leveraging and realizing on-chain financial innovations. There are currently two potential projects in the works: the spot trading platform Ethereal and the on-chain options and structured products protocol Derive. Ethereal will open its testnet next month, while Derive will launch its token within the next two weeks. These are just the first examples of the entire DeFi ecosystem being built on sUSDe, with more examples to be launched in the first quarter of 2025.
