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Ethena’s synthetic dollar token USDe is now live on Mercado Bitcoin, giving Brazil’s largest digital asset exchange a new entry point into the fast-growing stablecoin market. The listing, announced on June 5, targets rising demand for dollar-pegged assets across Brazil and the broader Latin American region.
With a market cap hovering around $4.5 billion, USDe is becoming a fixture on major centralized platforms, and the Mercado Bitcoin listing puts it in front of one of the most active crypto user bases in the Southern Hemisphere.
Why Brazil, why now
Mercado Bitcoin, founded in 2013, has been the dominant on-ramp for Brazilian crypto users for over a decade. The exchange reached unicorn status after a 2021 funding round that valued it at $2.1 billion. Mercado Bitcoin’s infrastructure is built specifically for LATAM compliance, payment rails, and user experience.
USDe’s expanding footprint
Earlier this month, Ethena integrated with Coinbase to offer USDe-powered yield products aimed at the exchange’s 100 million users.
USDe itself launched in November 2023 and has grown rapidly since, reaching a peak circulating supply of around $15 billion in October 2025 before contracting as global market conditions changed. The token currently trades between $0.9995 and $1.00. Its $4.5 billion market cap places it among the larger stablecoin-adjacent products in the market, though still well behind the giants like USDT and USDC.
USDe is a synthetic dollar, meaning its peg is maintained through delta-hedging strategies involving crypto derivatives. Ethena holds crypto assets and simultaneously shorts them, creating a position that theoretically stays dollar-neutral regardless of which direction crypto prices move. If funding rates turn deeply negative for extended periods, or if counterparty risk materializes on the derivatives exchanges Ethena uses, the peg could come under pressure.
Ethena’s governance token ENA, which launched in March 2024, plays a role in the broader ecosystem by governing protocol parameters and incentivizing participation.
What this means for investors
USDe offers something traditional stablecoins don’t: native yield generation baked into the protocol’s design. The delta-hedging strategy that maintains the peg also generates returns from funding rate differentials, which can be passed on to holders who stake their USDe. That yield component is what drove the Coinbase integration and is likely a major selling point for Mercado Bitcoin’s user base.
Brazil has been one of the more proactive countries in Latin America when it comes to crypto regulation, with its central bank developing frameworks for digital assets. How synthetic dollars like USDe fit into those frameworks could set precedents for the entire region.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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