Standard Chartered Is More Bullish On Ethena Than Bitcoin, Ethereum: Sees 7-Fold Jump By 2028

Standard Chartered said Ethena's buyback program and shrinking token supply could support its long-term upside.

• Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Ethena with a $0.42 target for 2026, $1.10 for 2027, and $2 for 2028.
• Analyst Geoff Kendrick noted that Ethena will use 95% of the net revenue to buy back and burn ENA while vesting-related selling pressure is also set to decline.  
• Standard Chartered expects USDe supply to exceed $40 billion by 2028.

Standard Chartered said on Wednesday that Ethena’s ENA (ENA) token could increase about sevenfold to $2 by the end of 2028. The firm initiated coverage of the token with a forecast more bullish than its estimates for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).

Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick said in a research note that it predicts ENA to reach $0.42 at the end of 2026 and $1.10 at the end of 2027. 

ENA’s price was up over 4% in the last 24 hours, trading at around $0.2. Standard Chartered’s price target implies an upside of 900% from current levels. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around Ethena remained in the ‘neutral’ zone, accompanied by ‘low’ chatter levels over the past day.

ENA’s gains would beat Standard Chartered’s forecast gains for both Bitcoin and Ethereum through 2028, the firm said. The bank has predicted Bitcoin will hit $300,000 and Ether $18,000 by the end of 2028. This puts the upside for Bitcoin’s price at over 250% and at 559% for Ethereum from current levels. 

Uniswap Sets The Benchmark

The bank cited Uniswap (UNI) as a benchmark. In December 2025, Uniswap flipped the fee switch. Since then, its annual buyback rate has been around 3% to 4%, said Kendrick. He added that the price of UNI roughly tripled after the bank began covering it in June 2026, the note said. 

To match its buybacks, ENA would have to increase by about seven times, Standard Chartered said.

The firm said the main risk to its outlook is a slower pace of growth in yield-bearing stablecoins. It added another risk is slower growth in tokenized real-world assets, which USDe now uses to generate yield.

Ethena is the fourth-largest stablecoin issuer, after Tether (USDT), Circle (USDC) and Sky USDS, the firm said. USDe is the fastest stablecoin to achieve a $10 billion market cap within nine months.

USDe Supply Could Hit $40B By 2028

Standard Charted said Ethena also removed a regular source of selling pressure. In August, the Ethena Foundation had purchased locked tokens from some major seed investors. The note mentioned that only tokens held by the foundation or by Ethena Labs employees would keep vesting from October 5. That’s 12% of the total.

Standard Chartered said Ethena’s buybacks will increase as its USDe stablecoin scales. The bank estimates USDe supply will rise to around $40 billion by the end of 2028, up from $4.9 billion currently.

At that size, annual buybacks would be about 23% of ENA's supply at the current price of the token, the bank said. That level was “far too high,” it said. Instead, the bank sees ENA’s price rising to where buybacks become sustainable.

ENA price has gained 31% this year so far.

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