“I think it starts with my thesis and my conviction in Ethena itself,” Christopher Jensen said of his decision to become CEO of StablecoinX.

Jensen stepped into the role on September 8 with an unusual inheritance: roughly 3.03 billion ENA tokens tied to Ethena’s digital-dollar business. He succeeded Ted Chen, who remains chairman. The Nasdaq-listed company holds about 20% of ENA’s total supply, giving investors a way to buy shares in a company whose fortunes are closely tied to the token. Jensen now has to develop the services that could give StablecoinX a business beyond its holdings.

He and Chen spoke with WorldsEdge during the H.C. Wainwright Global Investment Conference in New York. Jensen had spent the previous 11 years at Franklin Templeton, where he helped establish its digital asset group. The firm invested in Ethena’s seed round, and Jensen said he had followed its management and products from their early days.

Chen brings a different investing background to the partnership. Before Jensen’s appointment, Ted Chen served as StablecoinX’s CEO. Now chairman, Chen brings about 20 years of experience investing in publicly traded companies to next phase. He says Jensen’s experience with digital assets made him a strong choice to run the next stage of development.

“What we’re seeing is an institutionalization of everything that has been on the blockchain into traditional institutional markets,” Chen said. He believes the shift is happening faster than he expected. Jensen, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be responsible for turning that belief into products and services.

Ethena’s principal product, USDe, is a  synthetic dollar designed to stay near $1. It uses backing assets and trades intended to offset changes in their value. A separate staked version, sUSDe, may receive rewards. ENA, the token held by StablecoinX, serves a different purpose in the ecosystem. Buying the company’s shares does not mean owning USDe.

Jensen said an institution interested in stablecoins can buy shares in a listed issuer or hold a digital asset it expects to benefit from their growth. Access to other products through a conventional investment portfolio remains limited.

“I think a company like StablecoinX can help package those Ethena products in a way that brings access to institutional allocators and investors,” he said. He was describing what the company hopes to develop. No new investment product was announced in the interview.

Chen sees the largest opportunity in the services institutions would need to use digital-dollar products. “That to me is probably the biggest opportunity in terms of growing in the traditional financial markets,” he said. Jensen also wants to find ways to distribute Ethena-based products through channels institutional investors already use.

StablecoinX reported holding approximately 3.03 billion ENA tokens, or 20% of the total supply, when Christopher Jensen became CEO. The animation shows the status of its three business lines: infrastructure services operating, with software and distribution in development.

The company operates infrastructure services today, including systems that validate blockchain activity and check transactions moving between blockchains. Its software and distribution businesses are still in development, according to company filings. Jensen must turn those plans into services institutions will buy.

Both executives acknowledged that adoption requires more than building the technology. “Everybody is at a different part in their journey,” Jensen said of investors learning how blockchain-based finance works.

“Education is the first step of getting adoption up,” Chen said. Trust comes next. He described a corporate treasury encountering a digital-dollar product through an asset manager or software provider it already knows, rather than through an unfamiliar company asking it to change how it holds money.

“When you’re dealing with money generally,” Chen said, clients need to understand the “credibility and the support and the safety” of the systems involved.

Those concerns have substance. USDe differs from a conventional stablecoin backed by dollar reserves. Ethena identifies risks involving the trades used to support its value, the underlying assets and custody. U.S. law also draws distinctions among digital-dollar products. The GENIUS Act restricts permitted payment-stablecoin issuers from paying yield solely for holding their coins.

WorldsEdge previously interviewed Chase Ergen about his effort to modernize the dollar through private-sector technology. I asked Jensen who he thought should control the digital dollar’s future. He described a financial system that could use stablecoins alongside digital versions of bank deposits and currencies issued by central banks.

“I don’t think it’s going to be just the private sector,” he said. “It’s not going to be controlled in our view by one entity.”

For StablecoinX, the immediate question is whether institutions will use the services Chen and Jensen envision. The ENA holding is already on the books and its infrastructure services are operating. Jensen wants its software and distribution work to give the company another source of revenue.

“We’re more than just a treasury company, right, that owns a lot of ENA on its balance sheet,” Jensen said. “It really is building a business that has the software component, that has the infrastructure component, and the distribution of these products, really to support that ecosystem.”

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