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Ethereal, the spot and perpetual futures DEX approved by Ethena community governance, announced in a Tuesday X thread that its mainnet alpha is now live, and a small group of users can start trading with USDe, a synthetic dollar stablecoin by Ethena Labs.
First proposed to Ethena governance last year, Ethereal is described as the “only perps DEX building a complete all-in-one DeFi money app around USDe,” according to the project’s documentation. Under that plan, ENA holders are set to receive 15% of any future Ethereal token, tying the exchange’s growth directly to Ethena’s token economy.
ENA 24-hour price chart. Source: CoinGecko
Following the mainnet launch announcement, the price of ENA jumped nearly 4%, pushing it into the biggest gainers among the top-100 assets over the past 24 hours, per data from CoinGecko.
According to the DEX’s documentation, Ethereal runs on its own Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) appchain — a type of custom blockchain built for a single application — called the Ethereal Chain. The chain uses Ethereum Layer 2 Arbitrum’s execution layer, and settlement takes place on Arbitrum One, while Celestia provides data availability. For perps trading, margin, funding, and profit and loss (PnL) settle in USDe on Converge — a blockchain developed by Ethena Labs and Securitize.
That design lets Ethereal process trades inside a purpose-built appchain, while still keeping Ethereum-level security through Arbitrum and Ethena’s shared stack. According to the documentation, the setup also relies on Conduit for sequencing, Pyth for price feeds, and LayerZero for cross-chain messaging.
Earlier in October, Ethena Labs teamed up with Jupiter, the largest DEX aggregator on Solana, to jointly launch JupUSD, a new stablecoin built on Solana. The stablecoin is still in development and is expected to launch in the coming months.
