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The DAT trend may differ from prior implosions
September 8, 2025 09:52 am
Ethena Labs founder Guy Young | DAS 2025 New York by Mike Lawrence for Blockworks
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If you’re waiting for the conversation to shift away from Digital Asset Treasury companies, prepare to wait longer. Same goes for those anticipating a cascade of implosions.
“ You probably end up having an evolution of these DATs, where instead of just putting a one-to-one token in it, DATs basically become this vehicle through which capital ends up getting mobilized in the TradFi world and then deployed onchain at scale,” Yano posited on today’s Empire podcast to Ethena Labs CEO Guy Young.
With that in mind, Yano wondered whether the over-leveraged blowups at the end of 2021 and into 2022 has Young scared of a redux.
In the cases where the carry trade is collateralized one-to-one with the target asset — for example, raising $5 billion to deploy $5 billion — the stablecoin founder doesn’t see cause for concern.
“I think the risk obviously comes if you start to lever up all of the underlying assets and you’re, you know, 2x long ETH within the vehicle itself, and then these things start getting liquidated. Obviously that becomes a bit more challenging,” Young said.
“I think the one thing that’s good is that they’re all much more transparent vehicles, right? Like, we couldn’t really see into the balance sheets of all of the entities that blew up last cycle, while here, you actually have disclosure requirements to be showing to the market. So anyone who’s reading those documents will be well aware of how much leverage there actually is.”
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Aave’s revenues have doubled from April lows and are fast approaching all-time highs. With 35% of borrow interest coming from ETH and 55% from stablecoins, Aave is emerging as a powerful proxy as an ETH and stablecoin beta. As looping strategies accelerate growth and Horizon positions the protocol to ride the RWA wave, Aave is shaping up as one of DeFi’s most compelling multi-narrative plays.
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