The Ethena community-backed decentralized exchange, Ethereal, has officially launched its mainnet alpha, introducing spot and perpetual futures trading powered by USDe, Ethena Labs’ synthetic dollar stablecoin.
Initially proposed to Ethena governance last year, Ethereal is designed as a comprehensive decentralized finance (DeFi) money application centered around USDe. The project aims to tightly integrate with the Ethena ecosystem, offering holders of ENA tokens a stake in future rewards. Specifically, 15% of any forthcoming Ethereal tokens will be allocated to ENA holders, linking the exchange’s growth directly to the ENA token economy.
Following the announcement of Ethereal’s mainnet alpha rollout on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), ENA saw its price rise by nearly 4% within 24 hours, making it one of the top gainers among the leading 100 crypto assets, according to data from CoinGecko.
The Ethereal DEX operates on a dedicated Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) appchain known as the Ethereal Chain. This application-specific blockchain leverages Arbitrum’s Layer 2 execution layer for transaction processing, while settlements occur on Arbitrum One. Data availability services are provided by Celestia, enhancing network efficiency. For perpetual futures trading, margin management, funding, and profit and loss (PnL) settlements are conducted in USDe on Converge, a blockchain jointly developed by Ethena Labs and Securitize.
This architecture allows Ethereal to execute trades on a specialized appchain tailored for the DEX’s operational needs, while maintaining Ethereum-level security through the use of Arbitrum and Ethena’s shared infrastructure stack. Additional key components in Ethereal’s setup include Conduit for sequencing transactions, Pyth for providing price oracles, and LayerZero for facilitating cross-chain communications.
In a related development earlier this month, Ethena Labs announced a collaboration with Jupiter, the largest decentralized exchange aggregator on Solana, to create JupUSD—a new stablecoin built on the Solana blockchain. JupUSD remains under development with a planned launch later in the year.
With the mainnet launch of Ethereal, Ethena strengthens its position in the DeFi space by offering a native multi-functional trading platform integrated with its proprietary stablecoin and token incentives.
