Synthetic dollar blockchain project Ethena is launching a new stablecoin, according to an announcement on Monday. Dubbed USDtb, the token will be backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, which has well over half a billion dollars worth of mostly U.S. Treasury bills under management. 

This marks a serious departure for Ethena, which cut its teeth in the synthetic dollar market with its experimental USDe token, pegged to the U.S. dollar through a derivative-based trading strategy.

“USDtb provides an entirely differentiated risk profile compared to USDe, Ethena’s flagship synthetic dollar offering, with a dollar peg backed by reserve assets equal to the $USD value of every USDtb issued,” the startup wrote in a statement. 

In other words, USDtb will function much more like traditional stablecoins such as USDC and USDT, which hold a dollar or dollar equivalent in reserve for every stablecoin issued; that way, the tokens can always be redeemed for cash. 

According to a press release, BUIDL will account for over 90% of USDtb’s overall reserves — the highest BUIDL allocation of any stablecoin issuer. The remaining 10% will be held in stablecoins, to facilitate redemptions or regulated, institutional-grade tokenized U.S. Treasury products.

Additionally, USDtb will be launched in partnership with Securitize, which issues the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund.

BlackRock's BUIDL token represents a share in a tokenized fund that invests primarily in short-term U.S. government debt as well as cash and repos. It is the largest such tokenized fund and trades on Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon. 

By tapping BUIDL, Ethena hopes to keep USDtb “fully independent and bankruptcy remote from other business interests.” That’s because its flagship token, USDe, operates based on the vicissitudes of the market. 

USDe deploys a "delta-neutral" strategy that capitalizes on the difference in price between an asset's spot and futures markets. When prices rise, it purchases spot stETH while shorting ETH futures, hoping the prices converge, thereby keeping USDe's 1:1 peg to the dollar.

USDe is also backed by free-floating assets like BTC, ETH and SOL as well as stablecoins, including USDC and USDT. Last week, the Ethena Risk Committee voted to add USDtb as an eligible asset for this Reserve Fund. 

In some sense, USDtb will take on a special role as a USDe reserve asset in that Ethena plans to use the stablecoin as a safe haven during moments when its cash-and-carry trade breaks down, as happens when funding rates go negative. 

“The hedges would be closed and the BTC or whatever is replaced with USDtb,” Zack Rosenberg, general counsel at Ethena Labs, told The Block in a direct message. “It reduces the risk profile for USDe because the USDtb portion is not exposed to negative funding rates.”

“It was partly proposed/developed for that purpose but also as a separate product with a different profile,” Rosenberg added. USDe is the third-largest and fastest-growing USD-denominated crypto asset with a total value locked of over $5 billion. 

“In light of the rapidly accelerating demand for different stablecoin options, we saw a clear opportunity to provide a new product that offers users an entirely different risk profile from USDe without them having to leave our trusted ecosystem,” Guy Young, founder of Ethena, said in a statement.

Like other regulated stablecoins, USDtb can only be minted by whitelisted users. This includes clearing AML checks and other forms of screening performed by Pallas, a BVI-based company that would legally own and manage all USDtb reserve assets. 

Rosenberg said Ethena Labs is a service provider to Pallas while an Ethena subsidiary acts as the investment manager for the Pallas Fund. However, Pallas does not offer any other products. 

USDtb uses Copper, Zodia Custody, Komainu and Coinbase Institutional as custodians. Ethena submitted the protocol to three full security reviews from auditors Pashov, Quantstamp and Cyfrin in October with no high- or medium-level findings.

Last week, Ethena and Securitize submitted USDtb for Spark’s Tokenization Grand Prix, which is handing out up to $1 billion of liquidity to selected onboarding partners. The proposal would include a facility to swap USDtb and USDe — which already contribute approximately $120 million in annual revenue to the Sky (née MakerDAO) ecosystem — making managing allocations between these assets in response to interest rate changes easier. 

If selected, this could significantly enhance the liquidity and utility of USDtb.

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