What EthenaPay's Daily Boost paid

EthenaPay's Daily Boost paid 0.5% a year on a wallet's first $5,000, or 1.5% a year on the whole balance for a smaller group, on top of a base payment of 4.5% a year on all of it. That is what two reward accounts sent to EthenaPay wallets for each day from October 1 to October 8, 2026, and it matched the 5% and 6% tiers and the caps in Ethena Pay's terms, its FAQ, Terms of Use and pricing page. This review calls the wallets paid 1.5% the 6% group, after their total. Across all balances the two accounts paid 5.39% a year, or 5.54% with daily compounding. Most of the USDe was in the 6% group, and about a fifth sat above a cap and earned only the base.

EthenaPay is this site's name for Ethena Pay, Ethena's payment app and card. USDe is Ethena's synthetic dollar, the token the wallets hold and the card spends. A wallet is a contract on the Avalanche blockchain created by one of EthenaPay's two factory contracts. The Daily Boost, or Boost, is Ethena Pay's daily reward on balances, set as the tier's total rate less a base rate that Ethena Pay said it did not set. The terms set three tiers, Standard at 5% a year on up to $5,000 and Pro and VIP at 6% on up to $100,000 and $1,000,000, base rate included.

The Boost also went to wallets that had never used the card. Ethena Pay's terms tied the Boost to a card transaction in the calendar month, or to other qualifying activity Ethena Pay might specify. All 40 wallets that held 100 USDe or more on some September day and had never used the card by the end of October 9 received the Boost for September. The 61 such wallets in October were paid for October 1 to 8 as well, with most of the month still to run. The chain shows wallets and not people, and one person can hold more than one wallet.

The Boost topped the base up to 5% or 6%

Two accounts paid EthenaPay wallets in USDe for every day from October 1 to 8, and the dashboard's query labeled them yield and other rewards. The site's cash-flow review found no source that said which paid which part, and the payments showed it. The yield account, called the base account here, paid one rate on a wallet's whole balance. The other-rewards account, called the Boost account here, paid amounts that matched the Boost.

An accrual day is the day a payment is for. This review set each payment against the wallet's time-weighted balance for the accrual day, its USDe balance averaged over every second from midnight to midnight UTC. It tested the wallets that held 100 USDe or more on average, enough for a 0.5% Boost to reach 0.001 USDe a day, the smallest Boost payment for October 1 or October 8. One wallet on one day is a wallet-day. A rate's daily share is the daily rate that compounds to it over 365 days, and a payment matched a rate when it came within 1% of the balance times that daily share. The payments treated the caps as amounts of USDe, so $5,000 here is 5,000 USDe.

Together the three Boost rates matched 4,132 of the 4,351 wallet-days. Eight were unpaid, all for one wallet that received no base payment either, and one matched the 2.0% rate that the 6% group was paid before September 16. Of the 210 that matched none, 194 had USDe move in or out of the wallet during the day.

Each day's payment was the balance times the daily share, so the rates were yields after a year of daily compounding. All 61 Standard wallets above 5,000 USDe received the same 0.06832295 USDe of Boost for October 8, the daily share of 0.5% on 5,000 USDe. The rate divided by 365 would have paid 0.06849315. A payment divided by the balance and multiplied by 365 gives a rate before compounding. The base and the Standard Boost came to 4.90% a year before compounding and 5.02% after it, against the Standard tier's 5%. The base and the 1.5% Boost came to 5.89% and 6.07%, against 6% for the Pro and VIP tiers.

On October 8, 98 wallets were paid at the 1.5% rate, 95 within 1% and 3 within 5%. Seven of them held more than 100,000 USDe and were paid 1.5% on all of it, as the VIP cap of $1,000,000 allowed, and one was paid on its first 100,000 USDe, the Pro cap. No wallet held more than 1,000,000 USDe, so the VIP cap itself went untested. Three wallets on the Standard rate held more than 100,000 USDe each, so a balance alone did not show a tier. The pages read for this review did not say how a user becomes Pro or VIP.

Most of the USDe was in the 6% group

On October 8, 1,153 wallets held a time-weighted 4,366,721 USDe. In this section a wallet that missed every rate by more than 1% counts under the one it came within 5% of. The 98 wallets paid at 1.5% held 2,626,912 USDe of it, 60.2%. The 473 wallets paid at the Standard rate held 1,679,407 USDe, and 61 of them held more than 5,000 USDe, with 927,374 USDe above the cap between them. In all, 77.3% of the USDe sat within the cap of the rate its wallet was paid, and 21.3% sat above a cap and earned only the base. The rest was in wallets under 100 USDe and in 14 wallets whose Boost came within 5% of no rate or was not paid.

From October 1 to 8 the two accounts paid 4,771.00 USDe on an average balance of 4,037,430 USDe, 5.39% a year before compounding and 5.54% after it. The base made up 4.40% and the Boost 0.99%.

Wallets that never used the card were paid the Boost

Ethena Pay's Terms of Use, last updated September 22, said the Boost accrued on a day only if the user completed a qualifying card transaction, or other qualifying activity Ethena Pay might specify, in that day's calendar month. They defined a qualifying card transaction as, among other conditions, a settled purchase at a merchant that was not reversed or refunded. A card payment moves USDe from the wallet to one of two settlement addresses, contracts that pass the funds on to the card issuer, and the cash-flow review's weekend counts pointed to that transfer happening when the card is used. In this review, a wallet that never used the card is one that never sent USDe to either address before the end of October 9. Counted by the site's spend events instead, the AllowanceSpent records the spend-events guide describes, the wallets counted below split the same way at September 30, and none of those that never used the card had a spend event through October 5.

September was complete, and card payments were read to the end of October 9, nine days past it and longer than the one to three business days the FAQ gave for a card payment to settle, so the September groups would hold even if USDe left wallets at settlement. Of the 572 wallets that held 100 USDe or more on at least one September day, 519 used the card in September.

The 42 wallets with no card use from September 1 to October 9 received 127.91 USDe, 8.6% of the 1,494.21 USDe the Boost account paid for September. One wallet that never used the card received 61.80 USDe of it. The one unpaid wallet in the first row held 100 USDe or more on one day only. The Terms of Use read for this review were last updated on September 22 and the pricing page on September 30, and this review did not see the wording in force earlier in September.

October 1 to 8 showed the same. Of the 659 wallets that held 100 USDe or more on at least one day from October 1 to 8, 61 had never used the card through October 9, and all 61 received the Boost, 141.99 USDe. One of them, holding 381,080 USDe on October 8, received 124.44 of it. On October 8 the 59 such wallets with 100 USDe or more held 712,369 USDe, 16.3% of the USDe in EthenaPay wallets, and four of them were paid at the 1.5% rate. The adoption review had found a similar share, 15.1% of the USDe in wallets that had never spent, counting every wallet at 15:53 UTC on October 5. The only wallet with 100 USDe or more that went unpaid for October 1 to 8 held 1,000 USDe, had used the card in September and received no base payment either. This review's accrual days ended on October 8 and its card payments on October 9, so an October card payment could still come later in the month.

No USDe went back to the reward accounts. Through October 9 no wallet sent USDe to either of them. Of the 40 wallets in the September table that never used the card, 32 still held 100 USDe or more on October 8, and each was paid within 1% of a tier rate that day.

The terms set the condition for a user, and a person could pay with the card from one wallet and keep USDe in another. Of the 40 wallets that had never used the card by the end of October 9, 33 never exchanged USDe with another EthenaPay wallet, and those 33 received 86.11 USDe for September. That rules out a direct transfer between them and a wallet that spends, not one owner funding both from the same outside account. The chain cannot show what other qualifying activity Ethena Pay may have specified.

Payments fitted UTC days, not Central European days

The terms said the Boost was ordinarily paid within 24 hours of the end of each accrual day and gave that time in Central European Time. The payments fitted days that start at midnight UTC. On UTC days, 4,133 of the 4,351 October wallet-days matched a Boost rate, counting the one at 2.0%. On days that start at midnight Central European Time as the terms wrote it, 23:00 UTC, 3,650 matched, and on days that start at midnight under the summer time in force until October 25, 22:00 UTC, 3,395 matched. The base payments split the same way, at 4,214, 3,668 and 3,396. Most wallets' balances barely moved between the three boundaries, so they matched on any of them. Among wallets with 100 USDe or more, 92 wallet-days of October 1 and 89 of October 8 had a balance on either Central European day more than 2% away from the UTC day's. On those, the Boost matched only the UTC day 56 and 58 times and only a Central European day never. The base did the same, 69 and 70 times against none.

The Boost account paid each day from October 1 to 8 at 02:30 UTC the next morning. The base account paid between 04:14 and 04:18 UTC, except for October 7, which it paid at 21:54 UTC on October 8.

The smallest Boost payment for October 1 and for October 8 was 0.001 USDe, which a 0.5% Boost reaches in one day at about 73 USDe. Smaller balances were paid about 0.001 USDe at a time every few days. From October 1 to 8, 258 wallets that never averaged 100 USDe over a day were paid a Boost, 117 of them on one day only, and the median one received 1.00 times its 0.5% accrual for the eight days. A wallet that held 5.30 USDe through October 1 received 0.001012 USDe for that day, about 14 days of accrual at that balance. That fits a carry-forward like the one the FAQ described for small cashback amounts. The terms said eligible balances had to fall within minimum and maximum thresholds and did not give them.

In September the rates changed and some days were paid late

The Boost account paid 1.0% a year on the first $5,000, and 2.0% to the 6% group, until September 15, then 0.5% and 1.5% from September 16. The base account paid 4.0% a year until September 16 and 4.5% from September 17. Before and after the change, base and Boost added up to 5% and 6%. The Boost fell a day before the base rose, and the base account paid September 13 to 16 in one payment on September 17, at a median of 4.0% a year, though most wallets matched no rate in it.

The Boost account left 166 of the 194 wallets with 100 USDe or more unpaid for September 4 to 6, and for the median wallet its payments for September 7 and 8 came to about three and two times the usual amount. The base account left most such wallets unpaid for September 9 and 12 and paid about double for September 10 and 29. Over the month it paid 11,569.92 USDe, within 0.3% of 4.0% and 4.5% a year on the time-weighted balances. From September 17 to 28 its median payment came within 1.2% of the 4.5% rate each day, but only 1,903 of 4,825 wallet-days matched 4.5% within 1%, and 451 went unpaid. From September 30 it matched more than 95% of the wallets with 100 USDe or more every day.

Both accounts together paid 13,064.13 USDe for September, the figure in the site's cash-flow review, which put it at 4.6% a year of the average end-of-day balance. On the time-weighted balance of each day it came to 4.70% a year before compounding.

How this review counts

A browser read every contract EthenaPay's two wallet factories created, every USDe transfer to or from those wallets and every AllowanceSpent record of a card debit to the two settlement addresses, on Avalanche C-Chain through block 97,161,009, the last block of October 9 UTC, from the Routescan explorer API. Each wallet's first USDe and its balance at 15:53 UTC on October 5, and the daily flows and USDe held on all 144 days to October 5, matched to the wei the chain recount this site published with its adoption review. The base account is 0xd0ec8cc7414f27ce85f8dece6b4a58225f273311 and the Boost account 0xab2b06efa6179e624f5e3b08b64978df114ff24f. The dashboard's notes describe the base account as the funding account of a Merkl reward campaign, and this review counts every USDe transfer from either account to a wallet as a payment, whatever contract the transaction called.

A payment covers the days that ended after the account's previous payment and before this one, and transfers more than three hours apart count as separate payments. Each day's median payment gave the rate changes and the late days. A wallet's Boost for a month is what it received for that month's days. As in the site's other reviews, USDe sent through a wallet's card allowance to two unidentified addresses counts as a withdrawal. Through October 5, only one wallet that sent USDe to the address in use after June 10 had never paid a settlement address. Ethena Pay's FAQ, Terms of Use and pricing page were read on October 10 UTC. The chain shows when a wallet was paid and what it held, and nothing about the tier Ethena Pay assigned to its owner.

Reproduce the numbers

The main script checks every input against its recorded hash and the recount, rebuilds the matched wallet-days of October 1 and October 8 and each month's groups from the wallet-level files, and stops before writing its tables if any of its 138 checks fails. The counts for the other October days come from the payment periods that the chain read wrote, and its script fetches the public chain data again. Download the daily table for October, the card use groups by month, the wallets behind the chart, or the calculation files and source inputs. No EthenaPay wallet's address appears in the files.

daily share        = (1 + rate a year) ^ (1/365) - 1
Boost for a day    = time-weighted balance up to the cap x daily share
Standard at cap    = 5,000 x ((1.005) ^ (1/365) - 1) = 0.06832295 USDe
rate / 365 instead = 5,000 x 0.005 / 365             = 0.06849315 USDe
before compounding = paid / (time-weighted balance x days) x 365
                   = 4,771.00 / 32,299,438 USDe-days x 365 = 5.39% a year

The EthenaPay dashboard tracks wallets, balances, spending and rewards, the repeat spending review follows how often wallets use the card, and the methodology page defines the site's figures.

Analysis of public blockchain data and published product terms. Not investment advice.