Ethena price reaches new all-time high: Here’s why ENA is surging

• Ethena (ENA) price reached highs of $1.49, surging more than 18% in 24 hours as most altcoins struggled.
• Bullish sentiment amid new staking rewards for ENA holders could push ENA price higher.

Ethena (ENA) traded to highs of $1.49 on Wednesday, its all-time high that sees the recently launched crypto project rising towards the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

According to data from CoinGecko, Ethena ranked 58th largest with a market cap of over $2.07 billion. The token’s value was around $1.45 at the time of writing, 18% up in the past 24 hours and nearly 30% up this past week.

Why is Ethena price surging today?

Today’s gains for ENA came as Bitcoin hovered near a key level following recent declines. Top altcoins also dropped as the crypto market mirrored stocks, with major US indices slipping amid hit CPI data and US President Joe Biden’s comments on interest rate cuts.

While BTC, ETH and other tokens struggled, ENA price benefitted from a spike in staking. Ethena (ENA) is the native token of Ethena Labs, a synthetic dollar protocol on Ethereum. USDe is a yield bearing stablecoin.

An announcement earlier this week of increased reward for stakers looks to have spurred activity, including from top Ethena whales. On Wednesday, Ethena Labs announced integration with top exchange wallets, including Binance Web3, Bybit, OKX Wallet and Bitget Wallet.

Users who lock up their USDe for a minimum of 7 days via any of these exchange Web3 wallets will be eligible for a 20% boost on their reward.  

On Monday, the protocol rolled out its “Season 2” staking rewards, with users locking 50% or more of their tokens will be eligible to a 50% boost to their reward.

Today we introduce $ENA into Season 2 in order to more closely align the growth in USDe with $ENA

Users who lock $ENA at a minimum of 50% of their total USDe holdings per wallet will receive

i) 50% increase in their rewards
ii) the highest number of rewards per day of any pool pic.twitter.com/zxVmpGZSN6

— Ethena Labs (@ethena_labs) April 8, 2024

According to on-chain data shared by Lookonchain, multiple whales have withdrawn millions of ENA from exchanges and staked since the announcement of Season 2 rewards.

Ethena recently unveiled a 750 million ENA airdrop for its community.