Ethena Pay Neobank Daily Rewards

$5.5M+in user balances

$3M+in cumulative card spend

1,360+users less than a month after launch

Published Oct 2026

Challenge

In September 2026, Ethena launched Ethena Pay, a self-custodial money app built exclusively on Avalanche. Users save, send and spend in dollars from a single app, with a card, a virtual IBAN and free global transfers. Every balance is held in USDe, Ethena's digital dollar, with multi-currency accounts on the way.

One promise sits at the center of the product: up to 6% rewards on dollar balances, paid every day. Balances earn the prevailing USDe base rate, and a Daily Boost tops it up to the user's tier rate.

Tier	Total rate	Boost cap
Standard	5%	Up to $5,000
Pro	6%	Up to $100,000
VIP	6%	Up to $1,000,000

Behind it sits a heavy operational job. Every day, each eligible user is owed a different amount, based on their time-weighted balance, their tier, their cap and the base rate of the day. When the base rate moves, the Boost narrows or widens so the total holds. Ethena had already built the logic to calculate those amounts. What it needed was a way to turn them into USDe in users' wallets every single day, for a fast-growing user base, without building and running distribution infrastructure in-house.

Two more requirements came with it. The experience had to stay fully inside Ethena Pay, with no third-party interface in the way. And no capital should sit idle in a contract waiting to be distributed.

Solution

Ethena brings the reward logic. Merkl turns it into daily distributions, at scale.

Ethena exposes an endpoint that returns, for each user, the rewards earned on a given day. All of Ethena Pay's reward logic stays on Ethena's side: tiers, caps, the monthly card condition and the moving base rate. Merkl ingests that endpoint continuously and turns every daily result into USDe that is ready to claim. No smart contract to write, no distribution pipeline to maintain.

The setup is also built to stay capital-efficient and invisible to users:

Pull-based token wrapper. Rewards are distributed in USDe through a Merkl wrapper. Funds stay in Ethena's own multisig and are only pulled at the moment a user claims. Nothing is locked upfront, and Ethena keeps full control of its treasury.
Private campaign. The campaign does not appear in the Merkl App. Users never leave Ethena Pay, and the program stays branded end to end.

The campaign has run on Avalanche since the beta in June 2026. When Ethena Pay opened to the public in September, it scaled with the user base without any change to the setup.