Ethena has launched Ethena Pay, a self-custodial mobile finance app the company calls "the internet money neobank," combining dollar savings, card spending, international transfers and fiat onramps into a single product built entirely on Avalanche.
The app holds user balances in USDe, Ethena's synthetic dollar, and lets users move between fiat and digital dollars, send money domestically and abroad, and spend through Visa's network of more than 130 million merchants, according to a joint announcement from Ethena and Avalanche developer Ava Labs . Deposits made by bank transfer or in crypto are converted into USDe, and withdrawals to external bank accounts settle in the recipient's local currency.
"Avalanche was focused on RWAs and tokenized assets before almost anyone else was talking about them," said Ethena founder Guy Young. "Ethena Pay can plug into the liquidity and applications already in the Avalanche ecosystem, then serve those products through a simple experience where users never have to interact directly with DeFi."
Avalanche's role is to move value behind the interface: it settles the transfers, payments and money movement that the app abstracts away from users, who never select a network or interact with onchain infrastructure directly. Ava Labs frames the arrangement as a template other neobanks and fintechs could copy, pairing a company's own product and customer relationship with Avalanche as the settlement layer underneath.
The rollout is limited at launch. Ethena Pay opened with an initial early-access list of roughly 400 users and plans to expand that list weekly as it moves out of beta through September. The app is live on iOS in more than 50 countries, with Android support, multi-currency accounts, and access in the United States and European Union still to come. Ethena has said the card is not available to US persons, reflecting the regulatory constraints still facing the launch in its largest potential market.
The product gives Ethena a consumer distribution channel it has not previously had. USDe's circulating supply stood at roughly $4 billion at launch, down from a peak of about $15 billion in September 2025, as competition from bank-issued and fintech stablecoins has intensified and Ethena has faced regulatory pushback in Europe, including an order from Germany's BaFin last year to wind down its EU-facing USDe business. Ethena has already processed more than $30 billion through its mint and redemption systems and says USDe is integrated across more than 100 platforms, but that activity has been concentrated in trading and DeFi rather than everyday spending. ENA, Ethena's governance token, rose following the announcement and was trading around $0.158 on Tuesday.
Whether Ethena Pay changes that mix will depend on how far the company can extend the rollout beyond its initial access list, and whether it can bring the product into the US and EU markets that remain excluded from this first phase.
