Ethena unlocks 40.63M ENA on July 2, with 171.88M cliff due July 5
The Foundation's monthly 40.63M ENA release hits July 2. Three days later a 171.88M cliff — 2.82% of circulating supply — arrives from the Core Contributors and Investors buckets.
Ethena released 40.63 million ENA from its Foundation allocation on July 2, the recurring monthly drip that has hit on the 2nd of every month since the March 2024 token generation event. It is the smaller half of a two-step supply event: a 171.88 million ENA cliff, worth roughly 2.82% of the token's circulating supply, unlocks on July 5 from the Core Contributors and Investors buckets that started vesting at TGE.
What unlocked
The Foundation allocation is a 15% slice of the 15 billion ENA total supply, or 2.25 billion tokens. Under the vesting schedule published by Ethena Labs, the Foundation bucket releases 40.63 million ENA on the 2nd of each month; those tokens are earmarked to fund USDe growth work — audits, risk assessments, liquidity incentives, integrations. The July 2 tranche represents about 0.27% of total supply.
The July 5 tranche is a larger event and hits a different set of holders. It comes from the Core Contributors (30% of supply) and Investors (25%) allocations, both of which followed a one-year lock from the March 5, 2024 TGE, a 25% initial release at the March 5, 2025 anniversary, and 36 months of linear monthly vesting after. Each of those monthly steps releases about 171.88 million ENA across the two buckets combined — 93.75M from Core Contributors and 78.125M from Investors — per DeFiLlama's Ethena unlock tracker.
Numbers
- Total supply: 15,000,000,000 ENA (contract
0x57e114b6…181e6061on Ethereum mainnet) - Circulating: ~9.03B ENA (~60.2% of total supply) per Tokenomist's live counter
- Allocation split: Core Contributors 30%, Ecosystem Development 28%, Investors 25%, Foundation 15%, Binance Launchpool 2%
- July 2, 2026 unlock: 40,630,000 ENA (~0.27% of total supply) from Foundation
- July 5, 2026 unlock: 171,880,000 ENA (~2.82% of circulating supply) from Core Contributors + Investors
- TGE: March 5, 2024. Full unlock schedule runs into 2028.
Source for allocation split and vesting terms: the Ethena tokenomics docs. Source for the specific July unlock sizes: DeFiLlama's Ethena unlock page and Tokenomist's ENA unlock events tracker.
What to watch
- Whether the Core Contributors and Investors tranches route to sale addresses or stay in vesting wallets. On-chain flow post-cliff is visible via the ENA contract holder page.
- USDe supply and yield stability across the unlock window. USDe's peg has held during past Ethena cliff events; the July 5 tranche is larger than any of the last three monthly steps.
- Governance activity in the Ethena forum — the Foundation typically ratifies audit and risk mandates that consume its monthly tokens.
Context
Stepwise vesting means Ethena's supply overhang releases in visible pulses rather than a smooth curve. Roughly 5.97 billion ENA — around 39.8% of total supply — remains locked and continues to unlock in the same shape through the March 2028 end of the Core Contributor / Investor linear vest, plus the Foundation drip that runs longer. Any month in which the 2nd and the 5th sit close together produces a compressed release, and July 2026 is one such month.
Ethena's Foundation is one of the more transparent about how it uses its unlocked treasury: the governance forum publishes the risk-committee and integration mandates the tokens fund. That's a rarer disclosure than most foundation-run tokens offer.
What other outlets missed
The 171.88M figure is being reported as a "July 5 cliff" without noting that it is not a one-off event — it is one step of the linear vest that began after the initial 25% release on March 5, 2025, and produces the same tranche size every month across the Core Contributors and Investors buckets. Framing the July step as an isolated cliff obscures the fact that Ethena will keep releasing the equivalent supply every month until the linear vest ends in early 2028.