Ethena buys back locked tokens from the seed investors who sold after October's peak

The qualifying test for the buyout is where the information sits: you had to have been allocated more than 0.25% of total supply, and you had to have sold some ENA after the market peak on 10 October 2025 ^[2]. So the Foundation did not retire locked supply as a category, it retired the wallets that had already demonstrated what they would do with it. Holders in that bracket who had sat through the drawdown got a different offer, their original cost with no discount, and none of them took it ^[9], while one wallet that had been selling also passed, citing conviction in the project ^[10].

Declining a return of capital at par is a valuation statement from the people with the best view of the book, and it is the part of this package that argues against reading the whole thing as a distress operation. It is also worth adding up what remains: about 12% of supply still locked with team, ecosystem and Foundation after the early close ^[11], plus the roughly 20% that StablecoinX holds under a separate lockup disclosed in its SEC filings ^[12], which is about 32% of supply restricted in one form or another ^[16]. The quantity is largely unchanged; what ends is the published monthly schedule that told the market when the next tranche was arriving ^[3], and that end date falls 360 days after the peak that defined the seller screen ^[17].

The revenue side is a percentage waiting for a base. Once circulating USDe supply clears the first milestone, 95% of net revenue paid to the Foundation from USDe savings, white-label stablecoins and the shortly-to-launch Ethena [X] goes to programmatic buying, with 5% held for growth ^[8], and the share steps up as further supply milestones are reached ^[4]. The announcement gives the share and not the amount ^[15], and the schedule is described as supporting a return toward prior scale ^[5], which is a careful way of recording that USDe supply is below where it was.

This reading may be wrong in some respect, but Ethena has effectively conceded that the unlock calendar, not usage, was the variable setting its price. If the marginal seller really was the unlock calendar, then closing it and adding a revenue-funded bid does the work, and the Master Framework Agreement, which assigns protocol IP and residual profit to the Foundation and leaves Labs equity holders with no residual cash flow ^[6], makes the token the only instrument with a claim on the business, though the Foundation is at pains to note that Labs shareholders never took protocol revenue through dividends in the first place, with the full agreement due in October 2026 ^[7]. If the marginal seller was instead shrinking demand for USDe, then 95% of a smaller number is a smaller bid and the calendar was a symptom. The third path requires no vote at all: the 12% sitting with team, ecosystem and Foundation becomes the supply question the moment investors stop being one. The test is at least legible, since buybacks are tracked on a public dashboard and Ethena has filed under the Blockworks Token Transparency Framework ^[13], so the record is public: the first milestone has been reached, the buyback is printing, the price is still lagging, and the unlock diagnosis was wrong.