According to Woofun AI, Standard Chartered has issued a strongly bullish signal on the ENA token within the Ethena ecosystem, predicting that its market capitalization growth potential by 2028 will significantly outperform Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The institution has formally incorporated ENA into its investment analysis framework and set a clear price trajectory: starting from the current low of approximately $0.28, it is expected to rise to $0.42 by the end of 2026, climb further to $1.10 in 2027, and ultimately reach a target price of $2 by the end of 2028.

This forecast implies enormous room for ENA's market cap to increase roughly sevenfold over four years, with the core logic resting on whether Ethena can successfully reverse the contraction trend of its synthetic dollar business USDe and rebuild its growth engine through a diversification strategy.

Standard Chartered believes that if Ethena can achieve this transformation, its token performance will significantly outperform traditional crypto asset giants, but this depends on whether a series of stringent business expansion and financial thresholds can be breached one by one.

The current contraction of the USDe business constitutes the greatest real-world challenge, with its supply having fallen by more than half from peak levels to approximately $4.9 billion.

Looking back to late 2023, USDe rose rapidly through a strategy of "going long on spot cryptocurrency positions while shorting perpetual futures contracts," with its market cap once exceeding $10 billion. This strategy had provided yields exceeding 20% amid market volatility, attracting substantial capital inflows into USDe and its yield-bearing version sUSDe.

However, as market conditions changed, this high-yield environment no longer exists, and USDe's scale has shrunk dramatically. Data compiled by Woofun AI shows that Ethena's various strategies currently yield a combined rate of only about 5.2%, far below historical highs.

Standard Chartered's forecast is built on a key assumption: USDe's supply must recover and expand to $40 billion before 2028. This means Ethena must not only return to its $10 billion peak level but also achieve roughly fourfold growth on top of that.

This scale leap cannot rely solely on its original crypto derivatives strategy but requires Ethena to completely restructure its revenue source mix against the backdrop of declining base yields to support larger-scale asset accumulation.

To address the depletion of crypto-native yields, Ethena is accelerating its revenue source diversification strategy, which has become the core basis for Standard Chartered's bullish long-term view. The current strategy mix has expanded to include DeFi lending, institutional lending, liquidity-stable stablecoins, and real-world assets (RWA), while introducing new trading strategies linked to equities and commodities.

Standard Chartered's macro forecast shows that the tokenized asset market (including stablecoins and other RWAs) will surge from approximately $350 billion currently to about $4 trillion by the end of 2028. Meanwhile, the scale of RWAs deployed on blockchain will rise from about $40 billion to $2 trillion.

This massive market expansion will provide Ethena with abundant collateral and yield opportunities, allowing it to no longer rely excessively on abnormally high perpetual futures funding rates to sustain expansion.

In addition, Ethena is also building customized stablecoins and Ethena Pay services beyond its synthetic dollar business, aiming to further broaden its revenue channels.

Standard Chartered believes that the coordinated development of these non-core businesses will help Ethena secure a place in the broader financial infrastructure, thereby reducing the risk of dependence on a single crypto market cycle.

The core of the valuation model lies in the triggering and sustainability of the buyback mechanism, and this mechanism faces strict threshold tests. Ethena's current fee adjustment mechanism stipulates that it will only be activated when USDe's supply reaches $7.5 billion, and 95% of eligible net revenue from related businesses will be used for ENA token buybacks.

Notably, the $7.5 billion figure is still below the starting threshold at which the revenue mechanism begins to take effect in Standard Chartered's valuation model. Analysis from Blockworks Advisory points out that as USDe's scale expands, the protocol's share of total revenue will increase significantly: approximately 5% at $7.5 billion, rising to 20% at $20 billion.

Standard Chartered adopts a 6% protocol yield as a reference assumption. If USDe reaches $40 billion and prices remain unchanged, the annual funds used for ENA buybacks could account for 23% of its current market cap.

However, such a high buyback ratio is difficult to sustain, as investors will factor expected buybacks into valuations, driving up the token price and reducing the buyback proportion. Referencing Uniswap's performance after enabling its fee adjustment mechanism, its annual buyback ratio eventually stabilized between 3% and 4%, and Standard Chartered set its $2 target price based on a similar equilibrium state.

But the risk is that if the protocol extracts too much revenue for buybacks, it will weaken the yields left for sUSDe holders, thereby affecting capital attractiveness. Therefore, investors need to closely monitor whether USDe first breaks through the $7.5 billion threshold and verify the yield stability of new strategies at multi-billion-dollar scales. The speed at which these key milestones are breached will determine whether the buyback mechanism predicted by Standard Chartered can truly materialize.