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Most Influential: Guy Young
Young sparked a new category of digital assets, yieldcoins, that sits at the intersection of DeFi rails and TradFi basis trades.
Updated Dec 16, 2025, 3:06 p.m. Published Dec 16, 2025, 3:00 p.m.
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In a cycle obsessed with memecoins and dog tokens, Ethena Labs founder and CEO Guy Young built one of the biggest and most systemically important pieces of crypto plumbing.
This feature is a part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025 list.
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In just two years, Young scaled Ethena from an idea — admittedly taking inspiration from BitMEX co-founder and crypto guru Arthur Hayes — into a $15 billion protocol by expanding aggressively, cutting distribution partnerships across exchanges and onchain venues, pushing its synthetic dollar USDe and yield-bearing sUSDe into every corner of the market. The result was a new category of digital tokens, or yieldcoins, that lives at the intersection of DeFi rails and TradFi basis trades.
Nick Van Eck, founder of stablecoin protocol AUSD, argued recently that Ethena effectively kicked off a new era of crypto-native asset management, with yield being the main product. Ethena brought yield fully onchain, opening up a popular hedge fund trade — the ETH/BTC basis trade — to anyone with a wallet, wrapped in a simple $1-denominated instrument. If Van Eck is right, this could be a $500 billion to $1 trillion business line over the next decade-plus.
Then, Young took Ethena one step further, entering the booming stablecoin issuance business and taking up the gloves against giants like Stripe and Circle. Ethena is helping crypto projects like MegaETH, Sui and Solana-based Jupiter spin up their own digital dollar tokens on top of Ethena’s infrastructure, as stablecoins continue to break into the mainstream as one of the biggest use cases for blockchains.
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- A purpose-built AI security agent detected vulnerabilities in 92% of 90 exploited DeFi contracts ($96.8 million in exploit value), compared with 34% and $7.5 million for a baseline GPT-5.1-based coding agent running on the same underlying model.
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- The findings come as prior research from Anthropic and OpenAI shows AI agents can execute end-to-end smart contract exploits at low cost, accelerating concerns that offensive AI capabilities are scaling faster than defensive adoption.
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