Janus Henderson Backs Ethena With ENA Investment and USDe Plans

Janus Henderson has entered a strategic deal with Ethena that includes an investment in the protocol’s ENA governance token and plans to use USDe, Ethena’s yield-bearing synthetic dollar, for treasury cash management. Ethena also said it will help allocate and distribute Janus Henderson’s tokenized funds tied to collateralized loan obligations.

The agreement matters because it shows another large asset manager moving beyond crypto experimentation and into partnerships with decentralized finance infrastructure. Janus Henderson, which manages about $480 billion in assets, is also exploring ways to offer USDe exposure to its clients through exchange-traded investment products.

Ethena’s USDe has become one of DeFi’s larger yield-focused products by combining stablecoin demand with derivatives-based hedging strategies. The protocol previously reached roughly $15 billion in assets during last year’s market rally and now manages about $5 billion as crypto markets recover from a prolonged downturn.

The Janus Henderson deal follows other recent links between traditional finance and DeFi. CoinDesk noted that BlackRock expanded a tokenized money market fund through Uniswap and invested in UNI, while Apollo Global Management partnered with Morpho to bring tokenized private credit assets onchain and invested in that protocol’s governance token.

Ethena has also been building crypto-native distribution channels. Last week, Coinbase Ventures disclosed its first investment in Ethena and announced a partnership to bring Ethena products to Coinbase’s user base, while Ethena separately expanded work with Anchorage Digital to support institutional lending through Anchorage’s Atlas collateral management platform.