Guy Young’s Bet on the ‘Familiar’ Crypto App That Could Reach 100 Million Users
In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Guy Young, founder and CEO of Ethena Labs, to discuss how Ethena grew from zero to billions of dollars in under two years, what that experience taught him about building in crypto, and why he now believes one of the industry’s biggest opportunities is surprisingly simple: a dollar that earns yield, inside an app anyone can use. The vision behind EthenaPay is not to convince millions of people to become crypto users. It is to build a financial product so familiar and useful that they may never need to think about the crypto infrastructure underneath it.
The Moment Crypto Started to Feel Different
Guy’s interest in crypto began in 2019, when Sid Powell, who later founded Maple Finance, showed him MakerDAO. He remembers putting up ETH, borrowing against it, and realizing that nobody was sitting in the middle approving the transaction. It felt so completely different that he compares it to using an iPhone or ChatGPT for the first time.
That experience also sharpened a frustration he already had with fintech. Having previously spent time looking at fintech companies as an investor, Guy felt that many of the first generation of fintech businesses had improved the front end without fundamentally changing what happened underneath. The apps looked better and were easier to use, but they still depended on much of the same banking infrastructure, regulatory machinery, and cost base.
DeFi suggested something more radical where a small team could build financial infrastructure capable of moving enormous amounts of money globally without needing its headcount to grow at the same rate.
The Users Are Not Coming Onchain
Guy points out that despite major developments such as Bitcoin ETFs and growing stablecoin adoption, several measures of onchain activity have not expanded as dramatically as many expected since 2021. That led him to a question: why should the next tens of billions of dollars simply appear onchain and interact with DeFi in the same way existing crypto users do?
Most people are not going to download MetaMask, acquire stablecoins, learn how wallets work, and navigate an unfamiliar onchain experience. The industry, in other words, may have been waiting for users to adapt to crypto when crypto needed to adapt to users.
Guy increasingly sees DeFi as infrastructure rather than the consumer product itself: “crypto as a more efficient backend for fintech.” That idea sits at the heart of EthenaPay.
What EthenaPay Is Really Trying to Build
When asked to explain EthenaPay as simply as possible, Guy puts it in one sentence: “It’s just an app where you can save, spend, and send to anyone in the world.”
Guy believes that outside of trading platforms, the crypto product with perhaps the largest potential market is a yield-bearing dollar delivered through a mobile experience. People already understand saving money, spending with a card, and sending money to someone else. Crypto does not need to teach them a new behaviour if it can make those existing behaviours better.
The ambition is therefore closer to Revolut than to a traditional DeFi application. A user should be able to deposit normal currency, spend normally and move between fiat and stablecoins without feeling as though they have entered an entirely different financial system. The end goal, Guy says, is for somebody to open the app, experience better savings rates, faster transfers and lower fees, and have “no mention of crypto” at all.
Owning the Entire Financial Stack
There is also a business reason Ethena wants to build the consumer experience itself. Many crypto card and neobank products sit on top of stablecoins and yield infrastructure created by somebody else. Guy argues that this means giving up one of the most valuable parts of the economics.
Ethena is attempting to connect the entire stack from stablecoin infrastructure to yield generation and the consumer interface where people save, spend, and send. Owning that relationship also solves another problem Ethena has encountered as it has grown: distribution.
Exchanges and other platforms like Binance or Bybit can place Ethena’s products in front of millions of users, but relying entirely on third parties means Ethena never fully owns the customer relationship. EthenaPay is partly an attempt to change that by creating a direct distribution channel to millions of retail users.
Going Global Still Means Going Local
Crypto may be global by default, but building a mass-market financial product is not. Guy gives the example of Brazil: if a financial app cannot connect with Pix, the payment system people already use, it is effectively a non-starter.
EthenaPay is initially focusing on roughly 20 markets, with particular interest in places where access to dollars has real everyday value. Guy draws a lesson from Tether’s growth, arguing that some of the greatest demand for dollar-based products exists outside the United States, particularly in emerging markets where local financial infrastructure or currencies may be less attractive.
The strategy is global, but the execution is intensely local because payment rails, banking integrations, currencies, and user behaviour all differ from market to market. And rather than trying to acquire everyone immediately, Guy returns to an old-fashioned startup principle: find the first hundred people who genuinely love the product and let them become its advocates.
Trust Is Something You Survive Into
There is an important lesson in offering people higher yields on their money: the better the number looks, the more people may wonder what risk sits behind it. Ethena has dealt with that skepticism from the beginning, including comparisons with failed crypto projects and periods of intense FUD.
Guy’s response to the trust problem is: “There’s a huge amount of value for just existing for a long period of time without messing up.” There is no marketing shortcut or equivalent for that. Financial products earn trust by operating through difficult markets, protecting users and surviving multiple cycles.
That lesson has also shaped how Guy thinks about Ethena itself. After a period of rapid growth and experimentation, he acknowledges the danger of becoming distracted by side projects while the core business still needs attention. His philosophy now is simple: do one thing extremely well first.
EthenaPay is a major new bet, but it is ultimately connected to the same mission as USDe: getting Ethena’s dollar product into the hands of more people. The bigger question is whether those people will think of themselves as crypto users at all. If Guy is right, they may simply open an app, save their money, earn a better return, spend it, and send it around the world. And somewhere underneath all of that, crypto will be doing the work invisibly.
👉If you enjoyed reading the summary, head over to When Shift Happens on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform to access the full convo.
Comments