原文作者:TardFiWhale.eth
Source: Twitter
编译：Frank，Foresight News
First of all, Ethena's idea of tokenizing the funding fees for the CEX (and possibly the DEX in the future) is very interesting, and I support it.
Also, given Ethena's transparency and the time it will take to bring it down, those who are currently attacking Ethena for its negative funding rate are clearly misleading – while there are some risks associated with negative funding rates, they may not be anything compared to the undisclosed risks that Ethena currently faces.
In short, after doing my due diligence (which is an unfamiliar concept to most crypto investors), I first disclosed on March 15 that Ethena had a critical vulnerability that would inevitably contribute to its collapse in its entirety, resulting in significant losses for investors or for reasons partially undisclosed by its risk.
In addition, Ethena significantly increased the complexity of the protocol by adding BTC perpetual contract trading pairs in early April, how do they decide which assets to deliver when creating/redeeming, how do they manage risk and balance returns between these different products?
I suspect I'm probably the only one who knows about this critical vulnerability, and of course Ethena's market makers probably do, but they currently hold shares in Ethena (e.g. Wintermute, Selini, etc.), such as Evgeny's statement about how they shorted UST/LUNA and still remain a "partner" in Terra/Do Kwon.
To be clear, I'm not saying that these market makers are doing anything wrong, after all, they are just normal in their pursuit of profit maximization, so what else can we expect?
Now, I'm going to show you how Ethena misleads the public by promoting itself as a synthetic dollar (aka stablecoin) – just to drive up the price of their token, and the driving factor behind this is the high demand for decentralized stablecoins in the market.
Ethena: Structured investment products denominated in US dollars
In fact, Ethena is a USD-denominated structured investment product (SIP) with two tiers, let's break it down in detail:
- Inferior sUSDe, which can share the revenue from SIP on a pro-rata basis, with a 7-day unlocking period, and can be exchanged for premium USDe;
- Priority USDe, which can be converted to USD on an instant 1:1 basis (for the sake of simplicity, I have ignored the intermediary role of market makers and asset swaps, there are other issues with this, I could write several pages here), but USDe does not receive SIP yields, which flow into Ethena's vault;
So, if you hold USDe, then you're actually holding a senior debt of a SIP that doesn't generate any yield, with no upside, only downside risk.
Have you ever heard of people in traditional finance buying corporate bonds that don't generate any yield? Users hold USDe simply because Ethena is incentivized through ENA token rewards, which essentially sell ENA tokens in the background and then advertise them as protocol revenue.
Now, Ethena is following Dokwon's lead, boasting that it has withstood the "stress test" to gain public trust, and they have put 600 million DAI into MakerDAO, saying that more money is on the way.
It's important to note that MakerDAO's decision-makers haven't disclosed whether they have a personal interest in Ethena (which most likely exists), and they're no longer even pretending to be decentralized.
At the same time, Ethena itself is far from decentralized: 55% of the tokens are distributed to founders and investors, not counting the foundation and ecological development parts of the team's control and decision-making.
If you look at the $13 billion full float market capitalization, they will continue to try to increase the total lock-up value (TVL) after the 1-year lock-up period ends, and then make a profit by selling the tokens.
Ethena's trick?
How did they get $2.4 billion in TVL? in large part through the use of deceptive marketing and incentivizing KOLs to recommend their products.
For those who believe Ethena can avoid the U.S. justice system in the event of a future collapse, refer to Do Kwon's recent conviction case while noting that the U.S. is not the only country that can take action against those who have caused investors huge losses through deceptive and misleading advertising.
Throughout the crypto bull run, my instincts have been on high alert as various frauds have occurred. When Martin Shkreli did everything he could to emulate ZachXBT, it meant that scammers abound in the crypto space right now, and Ethena is currently at the top of the list of projects that are about to cause the most losses to investors.
Notably, following the Token Generation Event (TGE), Ethena launched a bug bounty program with a maximum reward of $3 million. However, they limited the wording very narrowly to exclude anything I said, and their founder, Guy, responded that they would have adjusted the wording a few weeks ago but have been silent ever since.
When FDV reaches $13 billion and insiders hold 55% of the tokens, they have every incentive to sustain the scam, can you imagine going from a six-figure salary to a hedge fund to a billion-dollar person? I don't believe the Ethena team has any intention of changing the terms of the bug bounty, their motivation is simple, to cash out and make a profit.
The bug bounty program is just a huge cover-up, so I'm going to make things easier by going public about it all and holding all of you accountable for Ethena.
$1,000,000 vulnerability offer
I will fully disclose Ethena's fatal vulnerability and how it can be fixed (yes, it can be fixed), but only if at least $1 million is donated to the following known non-sanctioned entities, among them:
- 50% 给以太坊核心开发人员组织 Protocol Guild；
- 25% 给链上侦探 ZachXBT;
- 25% 给支持加密案件法律辩护的 Roman S和Alexey Pertsev或DeFi Education Fund；
I will not handle any funding, all donations can be made after evaluating my disclosures, I just need to publicly obtain confirmation from Ethena or its founder, @leptokurtic_, that I am willing to disclose privately to the Ethena team first.
I will give them a week before making a public disclosure, but will also respect any requests for a reasonable extension of time required to negotiate a resolution, and if my information is important, I recommend that the public urge them to be rewarded in accordance with the $3 million bounty offered by the bug bounty program.
Once Ethena's TVL surpasses $3 billion, my offer will lapse and I won't give them a free option indefinitely.