Ethena Fee Switch: When the ENA Buyback Actually Starts

The Ethena fee switch is close to approval, and the Ethena Foundation will still not buy back a single ENA for now. The reason has been missing from the coverage of the past few days: the buybacks only begin once the circulating supply of the synthetic dollar USDe reaches $7.5 billion. On August 30, 2026 it stands at roughly $4.07 billion. That leaves a gap of just over $3.4 billion to the first tier, about 84 percent of growth.

Anyone searching for “Ethena fee switch buyback” wants that one number. This article gives it, explains the four-tier schedule behind it, shows where the money for the ENA buybacks comes from, and sets out what two members of the Risk Committee have calculated in their own analyses.

Ethena Fee Switch Explained: What the Protocol Actually Switches

A fee switch is a governance decision that redirects part of a protocol’s revenue away from its current recipients and into purchases of the protocol’s own token. For Ethena that means a fixed share of gross revenue goes to the Ethena Foundation, and 95 percent of the foundation’s net income flows into open-market ENA buybacks. This is revenue sharing in its most direct form: protocol revenue turned into buying pressure for the governance token. The proposal names the basis explicitly as gross protocol revenue, the top line before any distributions are deducted.

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