Ethena Accused of 'Black Box': Stealing Mining with Locked Tokens, Ignoring Doubts

Recently, netizen Nomad revealed on social media that the Ethena team, a decentralized financial protocol, used 180 million ENA tokens, equivalent to 25% of the SENA supply, in the SENA third quarter points airdrop event. This operation diluted the profits of other participants and raised serious concerns among holders about the team's ethics and transparency.

Suspicious flow of team managed tokens

According to public evidence compiled by Nomad, Coinbase announced on August 22 that its Prime service would become the primary custodian for Ethena Labs and the Foundation's ENA token. Just one day later, the Coinbase Prime custody address received over 3 billion ENA tokens, far exceeding the circulation at the time, so it can be reasonably speculated that these tokens may be locked in tokens of the Ethena team and foundation.

With the launch of SENA staking on October 3rd, Coinbase Prime distributed 180 million ENA tokens to six wallets and quickly began mining. The distribution operation is as follows:

On the first day, two transactions were made (30 million and 35 million ENAs), followed by four more transfers in the following days. These tokens will not only earn Bitcoin profits, but also receive Ethereal Points expected to be launched by Ethena's collaboration DEX in 2024. Currently, the team's SENA has accumulated 20% of the total reward.

The team ignored the doubts of the holders and received widespread criticism for their past misdeeds

Nomad accuses that this is not the first time Ethena's team's behavior has caused dissatisfaction among holders. In Ethena's first community call, questioning the community issues surrounding these suspicious addresses received the most votes, but the team completely avoided discussing it. In addition, the Ethena team's "bad record" in arbitrarily modifying unlocking rules has greatly reduced the trust of the holders. For example, in the S1 mining activity, the Ethena team once requested holders to pledge 50% of the unlocked tokens when the unlocking process was halfway through; S2 participants are facing a blow from the temporary implementation of the 30 day average position rule, almost incurring huge losses.

Ethena's' Black Box '

As a CeDeFi project, Ethena's operating model is described as a 'black box', where users can only rely on data provided by the team and have no way of knowing the true revenue data obtained by the project from $2.6 billion in user funds. The outside world is uncertain whether the agreement will distribute all profits to SUSDe holders. For a protocol running in CeDeFi mode, trust should be the key cornerstone, but the Ethena team's approach has gradually caused holders to lose confidence.