Ethena Pay: Building the Next Billion-Dollar Neobank

Lito Coen leads go-to-market at Ethena and is building Ethena Pay, its mobile neobank. He told Julian Stafford he discovered crypto in 2017 while working at PayPal, his first job out of university, and doubled down in the 2018 bear market at a crypto payments company. In 2020 he started CryptoTesters, a crypto education and product discovery site with a podcast where he interviewed early DeFi founders. It ranked on Google for searches like best crypto exchange and earned affiliate revenue, until he moved into operating roles and let it fade.

In 2021 Lito was one of the first users of Indexed Finance, a project building index funds onchain, and became a contributor as it grew from nothing to a market cap of around $200 million in weeks. Six months later the protocol was exploited, with roughly $25 million taken by an 18-year-old PhD student. Lito described how a team member traced the attacker within 48 hours through a deleted Discord account, a bug bounty profile and GitHub, and how the attacker left Canada before an arrest order. The story is now in a Netflix documentary that includes a clip from Lito's old podcast.

Lito explained Ethena as a savings instrument for the internet that anyone can access, with yield that has moved from a market-neutral basis trade to strategies including real-world assets. For Ethena Pay he plans go-to-market in user pools: crypto natives first, where Ethena already has trust, then digital nomads, freelancers and online businesses that need to move money across borders, and only later mainstream users once licences and operations are in place. He said demand currently exceeds what the team can onboard, so users come off the waitlist in batches.

On marketing, Lito is cautious about paid influencers, prefers UGC, and is most bullish on founder-led and employee-led content, especially on Instagram. He sees incentive wars as a question of acquisition cost and payback, and said Ethena Pay's edge is owning the yield engine behind USDe, which earns on user balances alongside card interchange. His stated goals are to beat Revolut's first-year user count and reach 500,000 active users and about $5 billion in assets by the end of year two. He also previewed Earn Plus, a one-click managed carry-trade strategy, alongside security features such as withdrawal delays and possible deposit insurance.