Ethena Labs to airdrop 750 million ENA tokens on April 2

Ethena Labs is gearing up to airdrop 750 million of its governance tokens on April 2. 

The decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol will distribute the 750 million ENA tokens to holders of “shards,” or digital units measuring users’ engagement with the protocol, Ethena Labs said Wednesday in a statement. The airdropped tokens represent 5% of the total 15 billion ENA supply. 

The tokens will go to users who hold the USDe, the protocol's "synthetic dollar" pegged to the U.S. currency.  

According to Ethena Labs' statement, the ENA token will be airdropped to eligible participants on April 2 and become available on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges (CEXs). The size of each user's drop is determined by the amount of "shards” they accrue through April 1. The statement said users must keep their USDe staked or otherwise held on the Ethena protocol to receive the free tokens. 

Ethena Labs' airdrop follows the Ethena Shard Campaign, a six-week event that tasked crypto enthusiasts with collecting “shards” by performing activities on the Ethena protocol. During the event, USDe's supply hit a value of $1.3 billion, making it the fastest USD-denominated asset to exceed $1 billion's supply, according to Ethena Labs. 

The token's rollout also comes after investors injected $20.5 million into Ethena Labs during the past year in two funding rounds. These rounds included participation from Galaxy Digital, OKX, Dragonfly, Binance Labs and Bybit, among other investors, setting the token maker's valuation at $300 million, CoinGecko reported.