Guy Young builds Ethena Pay neobank to deliver yield directly to users

Most DeFi founders talk about bringing crypto to the masses. Guy Young decided to just build the bank. Ethena Pay, a self-custodial neobank app built exclusively on the Avalanche blockchain, went live on September 1. The app lets users hold balances in USDe, Ethena’s synthetic dollar, while earning up to 6% APY. Users can spend those balances through a Visa card with cashback ranging from 4-5% at baseline, scaling up to 10% at select merchants. The cashback is paid in AVAX. From delta-neutral trades to debit cards Young spent nearly a decade in traditional finance, including roughly six years at Cerberus Capital Management, before founding Ethena Labs in March 2023. The original thesis behind Ethena centered on USDe, a synthetic dollar maintained through delta-neutral strategies. Think of it as holding a crypto asset while simultaneously shorting it, so the value stays pegged regardless of which direction the market moves. That strategy worked well enough to push USDe’s circulating supply past $14B in October 2025. Then came the cooldown. By late August 2026, the supply had contracted to an estimated $4-6B. Rather than waiting for DeFi’s total value locked to revisit its old highs,...