Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Amplifying Your Ethena Yield with InfiniFi
Recorded: July 24, 2025 Duration: 0:46:10Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent Yield Talks podcast, DeFi leaders from Athena Labs and Infinify discussed their strategic partnership, the launch of Stablecoin X, and the innovative Converge initiative aimed at bridging DeFi and traditional finance. With a focus on yield generation and institutional adoption, these developments signal a promising future for both projects in the evolving crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Hey everyone. Hey, this is DeFi Dad. Hey, let's go ahead and try to unmute ourselves just to
make sure we can hear each other.
Mic check, mic check.
There we go. Hey, Rob, you sound great.
Hey, how you doing, DeFi Dad?
Hey, hey, hello. Great to talk to you again, Rob. And hey great. Hey, how you doing, DeFi Dad? Hey, hey.
Hello, hello.
Great to talk to you again, Rob.
And hey, Connor, how are you, man? Nice to meet you, officially.
Hey, guys. Yeah, likewise.
Let's see. By the way, Rob, I added Infinify as a speaker as well, but it'll just be you speaking, right?
Yeah, it'll just be me.
Okay, excellent. And then Nomadic, can you hear us okay?
Yeah, can you guys hear me. Okay, excellent. And then Nomadic, can you hear us okay? Yeah, can you guys hear me?
You sound great.
Sweet.
Here we go.
I think I got everything here then.
So yeah, I think I can go and kick us off here then.
So we got lots to cover here today.
So everyone, thanks for joining us.
This is Yield Talks on the Edge podcast. I'm
DeFi Dad here with Nomadic. Every Friday, we host a live space to review new and interesting
DeFi to spotlight what we believe is an on-chain opportunity more of you should know about.
So today we're joined by Athena Labs head of research, Connor Ryder, and Infinify Labs founder Rob Montgomery. And some of the context leading
to this interview or conversation is, you know, Athena and Infinify have a very symbiotic
relationship where Athena yields, I believe, underpin a little over 50% of Infinify yield.
a little over 50% of Infinify yield. And while they are instrumental in Infinify, Infinify actually
helps to amplify Athena yields by using a fractional reserve design. So we're going to talk
about how that all works. But I also too, just want to get into the details around like the
state of Athena. There's been quite a few major updates lately. We're all looking forward to
this like Converge L2. And I really just want to learn more about that today. I'm pretty behind
on that. And then there also was an announcement about the first pure play stablecoin treasury
company listed on the NASDAQ called Stablecoin X. And there's a huge tie-in here to Athena. So we'll
talk about that as well. But why don't we start, Connor, with just more on the state of Athena.
I guess whatever you think is pertinent to know in 2025. There's so much that you guys have
shipped over the years, but you are, I don't know, depending on the metric, you're always a top 10 DeFi protocol.
So, yeah, tell us what's the latest.
Yeah, I appreciate the kind words.
Yeah, so I guess 2025 has got off to a pretty good start, I guess.
I guess the year started with a roadmap piece from Guy, our founder, called Convergence.
Derry laid out three different verticals we'd be attacking in 2025.
Obviously, in 2024, Atena had a lot of success in DeFi.
Towards the back end of 2024 then as well, we started targeting CeFi a bit more with with integrations on on exchanges like by this and then 2025 you're starting to see atina move a bit more into the into the trad
space as well and that obviously um happened this week as well with with stablecoinx but
yeah it uh flat forward a month or two into 2025 and and uh it was a rocky month or two
i think it started around the the by Bybit hack that was an interesting one
for Athena specifically because we saw the benefits of off exchange custody play out in real time
yet a lot of people that was one of the first questions a lot of people had when Athena first
launched was how would Athena survive an exchange hack luckily kind of everything worked out well
with Bybit in that scenario and we were able to move positions off Bybit via Copper to different other exchanges,
and we were able to prove out in real time how that solution managed in a situation like that, which was great.
And we think a lot of people came out of that situation with a lot of trust in Athena, which is good.
a lot of trust in Athena, which is good. A few months later, I guess, then, yeah, the kind of
trade war stuff kicked off and we saw funding rates dip to around four or five percent and
Athena offering kind of more or less the risk-free rate for a month or two. And you would have seen
supply plateau. But in the last kind of month or so, we've seen funding rates pick up again.
That kind of powers the Athena machine, let's say. And I guess, again. That kind of powers the Aetina machine, let's say.
And I guess, yeah, we kind of spent the year and more than the last year really laying the foundations to kind of reap the rewards when funding does kind of pick up to double digits. You look around DeFi now and you have things like the Aave and Pendle integrations with people looping Aetina PTs there.
You've kind of two billion assets on each of those platforms.
You have, yeah, the likes of Bybit,
like I touched on, Telegram.
Yeah, just a ton going on,
nearly too much to get into right now,
but we're happy to dive into anything there.
But I think, yeah, with funding coming back now,
Atena, UCE has just reached kind of all-time high supply. And we just printed
kind of 12% APY this week as well. So yeah, starting to reap the rewards for a lot of the
kind of heads down building we've done over the last year or so. Yeah, just the last few weeks
have been crazy, just kind of looking at your growth again. And maybe, Connor, can you just
describe the importance of, you know, we're seeing the animal spirits come back to crypto.
Can you kind of get into just a little bit deeper that relationship between the importance of funding rates and Athena?
Sure. Yeah. So as I said, funding rates kind of do fuel a lot of Athena's growth.
And that's been the case since we launched.
If you go back to when we launched, we launched at a pretty opportune time with funding rates higher than like 30, 40 percent.
It was a pretty interesting time and we saw kind of explosive growth from Athena then.
Athena was built with kind of high funding rates in mind and that's the scenario we kind of did
want to take advantage of and we thought that was like a net new solution
for the industry where I put out a tweet this week about SUSDE having the kind of highest APY in the
industry at scale. The interesting thing about it Tina is that obviously we're one of the only
kind of issuers that are accessing the perpetual futures market which is kind of even more liquid than spot markets. That's like a billion dollar kind of cash flow opportunity there with actually not that
much competition.
If you compare it to like RWA issuers, there's like 100 RWA issuers competing on basis points.
Or you look at Athena, there's not much competition on a cash flow in the billions of dollars.
That's like perpetual futures open
interest on like a 10% funding rate. So, Athena was built to take advantage of kind of, yeah,
double digit funding rates. And we thought then SUSDE offers kind of a compelling use case for
apps and asset allocators like we have today to build upon and to allocate towards,
especially in high funding environments.
So yeah, I guess funding rates do power
a lot of the growth for Athena,
but it's not really by accident.
It was definitely built with that in mind.
Rob, could you share a bit more about Infinify?
Like what are you guys building?
You know, you went live pretty recently. So yeah, what do we need to know as DeFi users about Infinify? Like, what are you guys building? You know, you went live pretty recently.
So yeah, what do we need to know as DeFi users about Infinify?
Well, we offer higher rates on pretty much every asset in existence. It's probably the place to
start. But going out from there, what we have built is a system that combines a fractional reserve with a maturity tranche so we're able to take the
higher yields that you find in longer duration assets and the lower yields that you find in
you know truly liquid stuff like money markets and then we tranche them out according to how
long you're willing to wait to get your money back. Then we take, you know, your money from the liquid depositors,
we put that into the duration assets,
so we have more money in the higher yielding assets.
And depending on what tranche you're in,
the senior, which is, you know,
a truly liquid deposit receipt token, that's IUSD,
which is receiving, I think, about eight and a half right now, 8.75.
Or if you're one of the juniors where you can
choose how long you want to wait to get your money back. And in there, you're making between
13 and a half to 15 and a half. And you just sit there and earn yield. That's pretty much how the
system works. The interesting second and third order implications are that if you're holding USD raw right now as SUSDE,
well, I could be making you a higher return while giving Athena deeper TVL.
Because what I'm doing is when you deposit a dollar in me that otherwise would have been in a duration asset,
I take some of the capital that's sitting over there in the liquid deposit side,
you know, hanging out in Aave, Morpho, Euler, one of those places,
just waiting for somebody to deploy to the duration.
And I plug that capital in alongside your dollar.
So a dollar that otherwise would have just been an SUSDE
is now dragging along 30 to 75 cents of
additional capital into Athena, increasing their TBL and given anyone who's, you
know, proxy in their closet through Infinify into Athena, a higher rate of return.
So Rob, actually something you and I were talking about offline is with your
system and the way you're working with Athena, there's like a little bit of a lag on the yields.
And maybe I'll get you to explain that because still a lot of what's underpinning the IUSD is Athena PTs that were kind of locked in at a lower yield.
Athena PTs that were kind of locked in at a lower yield, but maybe explain what's about to happen
with this relationship probably in the next few weeks. Yeah. So we're sitting here and we've got,
I think we're the 11th largest holder of PT SUSDE currently for the maturity that ends this month.
We might be higher now that people are moving over.
We're up there in the top 20 for PTE-USDE as well.
And we even have about $10 million of PTE-USDE,
so ethereal in the mix.
And all of these are coming mature in the next three weeks.
That first segment of Athena,
that actually matures a week from now.
PTSUSDE and PTUSDE, I think we have something like 12, might be $15 million of capital in those assets right now. And we acquired those PTs earlier in this summer when the funding rate was sitting at 3%, 4%, the PTs were performing between 6% to 8%.
So right now, our yields are still based on those.
And you're saying, that's crazy.
How the hell are you getting 13% to 15% out of that?
But no, that's how InfinitiFive works.
We offer higher yields on everything.
offer higher yields on everything. And once we roll over those positions, we're going to be
deploying most of that capital back out into other Athena PTs, since it's already in USDE and SUSDE
base assets. Now, if you go look at what Athena is doing right now on Pendle, it's, I believe it's between 10 and 12% on the new PTE, USDE and PTE, SUSDE.
Yeah, SUSDE is at 11.2 and USDE is at 12.
So that's going to be a considerably larger rate of return that those new assets are going to be doing, which means that the rates that people who hold SIUSD and LIUSD, the junior tranche, those rates are going to jump pretty aggressively here in the next week or two.
those rates are going to jump pretty aggressively here in the next week or two.
Hey, Rob, could you break down just some of the detail that happens to amplify these yields?
When you say Infinify offers a better yield, let's say, than someone who is going to go direct to a Pend pendle and buy a ptsusde um maybe just try to dumb that down
for us this goes to the heart of like what you guys do with infinify and i think like why
protocols like athena obviously benefit from it and then also i think what plays into this is
like there's a convenience to this PT expiry.
Like normally if I go and I buy a PT token direct,
the problem is I got to come back later to redeem it for whatever I deposited,
something like SUSDE.
But really some of us just want to like
sit in something more passive
and continue to earn really competitive know, really competitive, uh,
Pendle yields through those PTs. So anyways, just whatever you can talk us through,
really try to dumb it down for us. Thanks for poking me back on track.
Yeah. So the basic function of Infinify, for those of you who don't know us,
I constantly have to be reminded to talk normal English.
Blessing and curse.
The best way to describe it is what we're doing is we have two different classes of depositors.
We have depositors who ordinarily would be hanging out in money markets like Aave or Morpho or Euler,
who are, you know, used to making between four to six APR, maybe 8% if they're really lucky.
And then we have our duration depositors.
And those are guys who ordinarily would be sitting in, you know,
SUSDE and are totally cool with the one-week cooldown,
or they're sitting in PTs and are totally happy to hold to maturity
or go out and run leverage loops.
If they need liquidity, they'll
accept the mark to mark that those entail. And so what that means is that we have these two
different groups that both have expectations of different returns, and we can take some of the
money from the liquid depositors that would otherwise just be sitting in a money market earning, you know, say 4%. And we can deploy it into these higher yielding PT assets like Athena and, you know, like raw
Athena as well. Since it's further out the yield curve, since it has a duration associated with it,
since it has some operational cost, like, you know, there's slippage. Well, those assets,
they earn a higher rate of return
typically. And since we now have more money in a higher yielding asset, our total return is now a
higher number. It's bigger than if we just put the liquid and the liquid assets and the locked
capital and the locked assets. And so now we can apply this tranching concept where we're giving
the people in the liquid side, we're paying them a premium for providing this capital, but we're not paying them the full premium that their capital is actually earning.
We're taking some of that extra money that their money is earning and we're giving it to the duration guys so that they're getting paid a premium for being in the junior tranche and providing us
information about what assets to acquire what ends up happening therefore is these guys who
are ordinarily being you know a four percent asset now they're doing eight percent their money if
they got everything their money was earning they'd be earning nine but they're not really upset
because they're still making more than they otherwise would and they've got these guys in
the junior tranche who are taking on the risk that some of these assets might have associated with them. Though, honestly, Pendle and
Athena are pretty safe. So they end up making above the rate they'd make in a money market,
but probably below the rate they'd make in a PT. And then the guys who would ordinarily be in the
PT, they're making above the rate they would ordinarily make in the PT.
And to speak to the benefit you're talking about, they're getting an auto rollover on their PT positions.
Since we're handling the operational side here, you don't have to worry about swapping from USDE back to USDC and then swapping into a new PT.
You don't have to worry about the slippage that you're going to get.
You don't have to worry about setting up custom cow swap orders
to get the best possible pricing.
Us being a protocol, we can benefit from economies of scale
and the sorts of deals that you can only get access to
when you have those economies of scale.
And so what that means is that as somebody who would otherwise
be going out and buying PTs, instead of going out and directly buying the PTs, you should come and you should deposit that money into our law of tranche.
You should deposit for either anywhere between one week or all the way up to 13 weeks.
And however long you want, you just hang out in that tranche forever.
When you say, I want my money back, you start your withdrawal process and then you wait whatever that duration was to get your
money back. What that means, ordinarily, you'd have to come back every, I don't know, eight weeks.
What is it? Three months that a PIT typically runs. You have to come back every so often and,
you know, swap out and remember to do that and do that across your entire portfolio
which is constantly rolling over it's a headache it costs gas it's annoying you might screw it up
and take massive slippage and wipe out all your gains i know i've done that before but through us
we do that for you and so all you have to do is set it and forget it and you're getting a higher
yield than you would in the raw pt and if you're one of those guys who wants to loop it, you're getting a better spread.
Yeah, I think you keyed in on a lot of like, kind of like taking away some of the frictions there
that can go into buying the PT because you're basically holding it in the underlying and
getting a higher yield on it. One little thing of alpha I want to throw out there again,
this is not financial advice, but for those of you that like to use Pendle,
Infinify just launched their SI USD Pendle pools,
I think a couple of days ago.
And the interesting thing about those is they also give yield endpoints,
but the underlying yield again, as we talked about, is still tied to kind of the older Athena PTs that are expiring soon.
And as soon as this rolls over, this SIUSD is going to get exposure to the yield of the higher Athena PTs, assuming they're going to be higher.
I think that's the trajectory we're on. Again, not financial advice. But all that to say,
I personally see a nice little opportunity forming with these Pendle YTSIUSDs. I know that's
probably fairly nerdy and niche, but for those of you listening, it could potentially be a good opportunity.
But I want to go over to Connor here because I think there's a ton of stuff we need to be talking about just about what's happening in Athena in that ecosystem in general.
So one thing, Connor, can you maybe like walk us through what Converge is and maybe where you're at with rolling Converge out?
Sure, yeah.
So, yeah, for anyone that doesn't know, Converge is kind of a joint blockchain initiative with Athena and Securitize.
And it comes back to this Convergence kind of roadmap piece that I was talking about from Guy in January of this year,
where we see Aetina as being the kind of vehicle that essentially forces the convergence of DeFi
and TradFi. So, yeah, so Converge is kind of built with that in mind. We have a ton of interesting
apps coming out on Converge, some of which are already kind of out there live today.
The highlight of that would probably be Ethereal. Ethereal is kind of like a,
it's an external team building a spot on Perpdex, but it's built on USD. So I guess for us that's
super interesting and something which we've been pitching is probably the wrong word, but looking for basically a team to build with is these USD denominated trading pairs.
So if you think about it from a user point of view, usually a user kind of obviously denominates their trading pairs in a stable coin like USDC or USDT and you're probably margining
a linear perp with that too. The problem is though on your margin collateral you're not
obviously earning any rewards, it's not productive collateral so you kind of have to margin these
perps and oftentimes paying the funding rate for going long. What's interesting about USDE-denominated perps
is that you have the potential to kind of earn
ATHENA rewards on your margin collateral.
That's kind of, yeah, fundamentally, I think,
game-changing for a lot of perp traders.
If you can have kind of productive collateral
that's earning, call it 8% to 12% a year,
think of it like you're essentially kind
of offsetting your your funding cost to go long so athena essentially kind of making it cheaper for
degenerate long plays to on perps which we know is kind of like a huge huge use case in in crypto
today um so personally and i know for the team ourselves we're kind of super excited about that use case.
Another interesting thing is obviously, Ethereum are kind of committing 15% of their future token supply to ENA holders,
which again is also super interesting for the Athena ecosystem.
That's true of, I guess, a lot of apps in the Athena ecosystem as well.
I know Infinify here are kind of rewarding Athena holders as well.
We've got different protocols.
We've got a new one, just launched Strata,
that's kind of tranching yield into senior and junior tranches.
They're also returning kind of a portion of their supply
or future supply to Athena holders.
It's essentially kind of trying to emulate this BNB model
that's been pretty successful.
I think not a lot of people appreciate how successful
that BNB model has been for Binance users.
Like if you're holding BNB and you're staking that
in their kind of launch bills,
we saw definitely in 2024 anyway,
a lot of the most successful kind of airdrops,
definitely on launch anyway,
in terms of price action,
were kind of launched on Binance.
And BNB stakers and holders kind of got great exposures to those airdrops.
And they kind of, yeah, that essentially, I guess, was quite productive for BNB holders.
So we're trying to emulate a similar type model for INA, where simply kind of by staking INA,
you're getting exposure to a lot of different protocols,
building on top of USD.
And I guess that's the vision we had from the start for USD is to be kind of this like neutral base layer
that's powering a ton of different apps
and a ton of different kind of like on-chain asset allocators.
Like, yeah, we're pretty neutral as to who builds what.
We just kind of want to focus on
providing i guess the best uh and the highest apy at the at the largest scale which we feel like
we're doing obviously a pretty good job at now at kind of 12 apy at nearly seven billion of supplies
so um yeah this is kind of what we had envisioned for for uh usde um and uh, I do think it's kind of like an example of kind of growing the pie
for everyone here. So you started with USD and we've got this like programmatic
trade. It's a delta neutral trade that is like automated for folks. And so that's been extremely popular.
You built up a lot of capital in that trade
or in that like automated trade,
however you wanna package that.
And then in my understanding,
like the way to think about this is like
the next major pieces to this like grand vision for Athena
is converge acting as an L2
so we can transact cheaply.
And then we've got a Perpstex, which would be Ethereal.
And remind us, what will be the collateral there again?
Is it just S-U-S-T-E, U-S-T-E, or do you guys call it something else?
I can't remember.
So, yeah, so for Ethereal, it'll be U-S-T-E.
There is also something which is kind of
more of an upcoming launch is um iusde which is essentially allowing kind of like a permissioned
structure around susde so again this kind of falls in line with this convergence narrative
that a lot of like traditional finance players uh can't't actually access on-chain yields.
They can't actually access on-chain assets.
They need a more kind of, I guess, institutional-friendly,
regulated wrapper around those assets.
And that's what we're trying to do with IUSD.
And hopefully then that powers kind of like, I guess,
permission versions of the apps that have been successful in DeFi today.
So we think there's hopefully a market there and that's quite untapped.
And we're talking like in the billions, hundreds of billions there that can actually kind of onboard, I guess, net new funds to DeFi and everything.
We essentially see DeFi, I guess, over the last few years as really shuffling the same chips around.
A lot of it's been used for like speculation use cases, whether that's kind of perpdex trading or meme coins.
I think the next kind of onboarding of net new capital really since like, I guess, the ETFs will be, I guess, permission finance.
will be, I guess, permission finance.
And I know that's a controversial topic,
but I think we need to build some infrastructure there
that looks attractive to traditional finance players
to come in and actually get involved on chain.
And then Securitize plays some role in all of this.
Can you talk about the partnership there?
Like, yeah, what's the role that they play?
Yep.
So Securitize have been a partner with us for a while now.
They actually issue USDTB,
which is our kind of more fiat collateralized stablecoin.
And they essentially have a kind of wide network
of institutional players in traditional finance.
You like the KKR and BlackRock and other entities. And so, yeah, they'll essentially kind of go to
market with us and kind of pitch this to TradFi and hopefully, as I said, onboard this kind of
new capital. And they're pretty much the perfect partner to do that with us, we think.
and they're pretty much the perfect partner to do that.
What else do you think?
So in talking about this kind of whole RWA angle,
that's too many A's in a row,
I want to ask Rob,
how does this vertical kind of fit into your plans at Infinify?
Is this like a sector that you're actively pursuing as well?
Will you have a part to play in Converge at all?
We've been chatting with the Converge guys.
Yeah, that was part of the original intent of the partnership we cut with Athena, was exploring that further.
I wasn't actually aware of the naming convention collisions.
dimension collisions. That's going to be quite funny. I do feel confident that whatever we find
That's going to be quite funny.
there, we can offer the highest yields on, especially given that it's so wonderfully
duration heavy. And I happen to know that some of our good friends in that sector beyond just
at the end are also going to be there. So when it comes to how we think about RWAs,
and I think this is where, honestly, Connor,
you and I should probably be talking more
because there's definitely a lot of synergy here
between your IUSD and our IUSD,
is we've also had the same ideas about permission finance,
about how when you're talking about traditional capital,
you really have to play in their KYC pools. You got to deal with the limitations that they bring
as much as you are forced to. But if you're able to do that and you're able to source both people
who hold the duration side of the equation and people who hold the liquid side of the equation,
you know, liquid capital suppliers, people like neobanks, credit unions, earned programs.
I mean, even small banks can be the source of that liquid capital.
And that's a retail distribution thing. And then you need to source people who hold the duration
side. So funds, people who are running
their own tokenization plays at scale,
won't say, won't name names,
but we all know a few who are doing these things.
I mean, okay, BlackRock's a great example.
Can't say I'm working with them.
Wish I was.
But there's others who are also running tokenization
of things beyond treasuries.
And where that gets very interesting is right now, the flow of RWA capital is extremely niche.
When you're talking about the RWA ecosystem as it is in DeFi, in blockchain in general,
RWA requires you to pay a premium to bring an asset on chain.
And you are bringing that asset on chain primarily
in the hopes of capturing existing on-chain capital into your off-chain asset. You are
looking to pull money from the on-chain ecosystem into the off-chain world. A lot of the guys who've
been doing this tokenization have been, well, a little frustrated to find that the on-chain world
doesn't really care as much about true asset quality as it does about APR.
It wants the highest return.
And it'll do some pretty degenerate stuff to get the highest return.
So they're finding that there's not as much of a market as they'd hoped for their tokenized assets.
so what is to be done well that's where we come in around the world that exists today where you
So what is to be done?
Well, that's where we come in.
have to pay a premium to bring your existing asset portfolio on chain infinify facilitates
the creation of a world in which you get paid a premium to bring your assets on chain and this
completely changed the calculus because if you tokenize your asset and you run it through us
and we refinance it using liquid capital sources, the ones I previously mentioned.
Well, those liquid capital sources, people who would ordinarily be just holding tokenized T-bills, they go from SOFR minus 30 to SOFR plus 110 pretty easily.
And that may sound very boring, but if you're talking about liquid capital returns, that's actually quite interesting,
especially if it's backed by AAA credit or at least investor grade. Now, looking over
to the folks who are already holding the assets, let's say they're returning 800 bps, 8%. Well,
what we can do by refinancing their position through Infinify with this schema I've mentioned is we can offer them the same duration exposure they already have, the same risk profile they already have, slightly concentrated, but 10% higher returns. Now they're suddenly making 8.8. And so rather than the capital flow here being on-chain capital, being encouraged to flow into off-chain assets, which is a much smaller pool, we create a world where off-chain capital has a reason to come on-chain.
Every single tokenized in the world becomes our distribution network.
People like Converge are able to attract
huge amounts of money from the off-chain world.
And suddenly,
InfinitiFy becomes basically the clearinghouse
for all this capital.
That's what we're working toward.
Very exciting.
Before we start to wrap up,
Connor, can you share some notes on the recent Stablecoin X announcement?
For anyone who's behind on this, there's exciting news around the fact that there's, call it like a pure play Stablecoin treasury that will be on the NASDAQ.
And anyways, yeah, tell us all about that.
What's going into Stablecoin X?
Sure, yeah.
And I guess just a disclaimer to start,
I probably have to keep this quite high level,
just obviously when we're dealing with kind of public companies,
it's a lot different than I guess talking about tokens and everything.
So yeah, I guess this kind of comes back to, again,
this whole thing about convergence and trying to align DeFi, CeFi and TradFi together.
I think everyone's pretty aware at this stage that there's this kind of like stablecoin super cycle going on.
Particularly, I guess, with TradFi, we can see the kind of latent demand there for exposure to the stablecoin narrative.
We saw it with Circle's IPO proving kind of very successful.
Obviously, Tether is like one of the most profitable businesses in the world, honestly.
There's obviously no way for investors to get exposure to Tether.
They've obviously done so with Circle and that proved successful.
But yeah, we're seeing every week kind of a new a new bank new new fintech our new
corporation comes out with news that they're exploring stable coins um stable coins are like
yeah top 20 holder of u.s treasuries now so i guess uh yeah it's about kind of trying to to
funnel that tradify demand into a into a vehicle in which they can they can invest into into athena
um so i guess that's what Stablecoin X is.
You can think of it as like an ENA Treasury vehicle.
And yeah, probably the most interesting thing
I think about Stablecoin X is actually,
and this went out on the Stablecoin X Twitter account,
so I'd recommend checking that out as well.
And their most recent tweet is,
if you look at the cash raised for Stablecoin X,
it was about 260 million.
If you look at that as a percentage of the actual market cap of the underlying token,
so ENA here, it's about 8% of the ENA supply that'll be kind of locked up in this treasury
vehicle. You compare that to a lot of the other vehicles out there. So even if you combine all the vehicles for hype,
you're only at around 2% of hype supply.
For ETH, it's about 0.4%.
It's all on the chart in that tweet.
Again, I'd recommend going to have a look at that.
I think that's what's interesting here,
and maybe it was like an underappreciated aspect
about the launch of that,
about the launch of that is exactly kind of how how much demand there is for this in a vehicle
is exactly kind of how much demand there is for this Ena vehicle,
which which obviously um yeah it could potentially be a big big sink of supply for um of ina so yeah
super excited about about that again it's just kind of being able to to kind of funnel some of
this demand now we're seeing for stable coins uh like even since yeah when i joined atina over two
years ago now at this stage I was already
pretty bullish on stable coins I definitely saw this as one of the most kind of sustainable
use cases and actually like meaningful use cases that crypto can offer and it's a narrative that
I think yeah TradFi can get definitely get behind more so than any narrative we've had in the past
I think if you look at uh yeah meme coins
nfts um yeah even things like decentralized exchanges i think this is a lot easier for
for trad fight to understand it looks stable coins look quite similar to to things they have
in their own infrastructure um and they're obviously quite keen and they've seen the
benefits now of of kind of adopting stable coins so um yeah, I guess, look, you have Tether and Circle
and Athena's, I guess, third largest issuer as well.
So I guess it was probably due to give TradFi away
to kind of access, yeah, Athena exposure.
Connor, I want to make sure we're understanding this.
The Stablecoin X, like Treasury,
they would be buying up the Athena ENA token, right?
Like we talk about it as the Stablecoin pure play because of the exposure to Athena, but
like ultimately the Treasury strategy is to be buying the ENA token.
Yeah. So yeah, it's a little more complicated than that. There's a few more layers involved.
And again, this is where I probably have to keep it kind of high level. And I'd recommend
going checking out both the Athena tweets and the stablecoinx tweets for kind of exactly the flow
here. But essentially, it'll be at the end of the day, the foundation buying back ENA tokens. So the
foundation would have committed a certain number of ENA tokens to this vehicle in exchange for obviously cash.
And then it uses that cash to buy ENA.
And it's actually buying about $5 million worth a day for the next six weeks.
And yeah, so you can expect, yeah, I guess this is where the kind of sink of supply comes from.
And this accumulation of ENA, which is hopefully super interesting.
this accumulation of ANO, which is hopefully super interesting.
Yeah. I mean, we've seen so much interest in ETH, Treasury Strategy, stocks lately. So,
yeah, it feels like a trend that is... It's exactly what you said. It's meeting the demand
in traditional finance for this exposure. As much as I'd love to see more folks
getting that direct access on chain
and that will continue to grow
and that happens of course through centralized exchanges
that offer custody services.
But what I've been blown away by
is just the appetite for bigger money to get exposure to the likes of ETH and Bitcoin.
And we've seen some other treasury strategy stocks for soul and hype.
But even just today, I think Bitmine bought something like 200 and some odd thousand ETH.
So, I mean, just enormous demand out there.
And so it's cool to see a DeFi pioneer like Athena leaning into this.
And there's a lot of demand for stablecoin exposure.
We actually just recorded a podcast yesterday with Electric Capital
about why holding ETH is one of the best ways to benefit from or get exposure
to the upside of stablecoin growth. And so anyways, none of this being financial advice,
but this to me is an extremely interesting play. And I'll definitely be digging into
everything you mentioned there and following all updates here. But on that note, I think this is a great place
for us to wrap up, guys. So first off, I want to remind our listeners they should learn more
about Athena by going to athena.fi. They should learn more about Infinify by going to infinify.xyz.
Follow Athena underscore labs on X. Follow Infinify labs on X follow Connor's account at
Connor writer and we'll put the exact handle into our show notes and then be sure to follow
Rob a non 94 as well that's Rob's personal account and all of these references. These will be in our show notes. Later on,
we will republish this space as a podcast. So we'd like to just clean it up a bit.
And that way it's easy as a format to share with your friends. So anyways, if you prefer to listen
to podcasts, great way to be able to share that with friends. Just go to the-edge.xyz and you can
subscribe there. Go to Apple or Spotify or YouTube, wherever we've got the podcast listed there.
Otherwise, guys, thank you so much for coming on. Just exciting updates to hear on Athena
and Infinify. And then, yeah, I'd love to give you both a final word here before we go. And
otherwise, we'd love to have you back in the future.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Really enjoyed the chat.
And yeah, excited to see more apps like Infinify being built.
Excited to continue accumulating USDE.
And very much looking forward to Converge.
If anyone here is looking to get the highest risk adjusted return,
either on liquid or slightly illiquid assets,
come on over.
We'd love to have you.
And thanks for hosting us, of course.
Absolutely.
Yeah, guys, thanks for joining us.
Everyone, thanks for joining the live space.
And we'll probably host another one next Thursday, Friday.
But again, if you prefer podcast format, go to the Edge podcast.
You can go to our link tree.
It's Edge underscore pod.
Follow Edge underscore pod on X or Twitter.
And otherwise, we'll see you next time.
So thanks, everyone.
Thanks, Jens.
Thanks, guys.
