Arthur Hayes, co-founder of crypto investment fund Maelstrom, bought the Ethena token this week, tying his latest move to a project vying for control of the USDH stablecoin ticker as Hyperliquid validators head into a decisive vote on Sunday.
Hayes has accumulated multiple tranches of Ethena’s ENA token over the past two days, including 578,956 tokens worth about $473,000 on Wednesday and two earlier purchases totaling roughly 672,800 ENA, or $521,000, according to data tracked by Arkham Intelligence.
The total, including those from Monday, amounts to roughly $995,000 worth of Ethena tokens within a 48-hour window.
Hayes’ purchases come as Ethena remains a contender in the USDH stablecoin race, with Hyperliquid validators set to decide the ticker on Sunday.
Ethena’s proposal, backed by BlackRock, would use its USDtb stablecoin to collateralize USDH via BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, with 95% of revenue pledged to Hyperliquid and costs covered for shifting trading pairs from USDC.
Ethena’s proposal is a “strong bid from one of crypto’s fastest-growing and most impressive ecosystems,” David Lawant, head of research at FalconX, wrote in a blog post published Wednesday.
Lawant pointed to USDe’s market cap of more than $13 billion and Ethena having processed $23 billion in cumulative mints and redemptions without security incidents or downtime.
Still, Hayes’ buy “reads as personal positioning, rather than putting a backing behind Ethena specifically for the USDH votes,” Kirby Ong, founder of HypurrCollective, a grassroots collective for founders, builders, traders, and power users on the Hyperliquid ecosystem, told Decrypt.
“With the $USDH proposal, the deciding factors will likely come down to validator alignments with their current stakers, whether prediction market sentiment translates into actual on-chain votes,” Ong said.
Ong explained that while prediction markets “help set expectations,” validator support “determines the valid candidates,” and that “ultimately, anyone can help to decide and set the direction for USDH by staking their weight and making their votes known by delegating to the validator that best matches their vote.”
Ong added: “The final outcome on Sunday may depend on which team gains the most trust and perceived long-term value for the ecosystem.”
Other contenders
Paxos, backed by PayPal, is also a top contender, according to Lawant. It revised its proposal on Wednesday, expanding from an emphasis on regulatory pedigree to pledging a larger share of reserve yield to Hyperliquid’s Assistance Fund and deferring any issuer take until the product scales past $1 billion.
On Wednesday evening, Paxos announced it had received an offer from Kraken to list USDH and HYPE from day one, with free USD on- and off-ramps, pending the exchange’s standard review.
It’s worth noting that Native Markets, despite being a newly-formed company, remains the top contender with 90% odds in its favor, according to live data on Myriad Markets.
Disclosure: Myriad is a prediction market developed by Decrypt's parent company DASTAN.
Native Markets pitched a GENIUS-compliant USDH managed through Bridge, Stripe’s stablecoin issuer, with reserves in cash and Treasuries overseen by BlackRock off-chain and Superstate on-chain.
Its plan splits yield evenly between Hyperliquid’s Assistance Fund and ecosystem growth, and promises a HyperEVM launch with seamless interoperability.
Decrypt has reached out to Hayes, Paxos, and Ethena for comment. A separate request was sent to Native Markets through an ecosystem operator (Max Feige).
Other contenders include Sky, the issuer of USDS (formerly MakerDAO’s DAI), Frax Finance with a bank-partnered bid, and Agora, which has warned against Native Markets’ reliance on Stripe-owned Bridge while pledging to channel all net revenue back into Hyperliquid.
