Ethena adds institutional tokenized credit to USDe through Janus Henderson partnership

Janus Henderson invested in Ethena’s governance token and plans to allocate USDe as part of its treasury cash management strategy.

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Add us on Google by Estefano Gomez Jun. 9, 2026

Ethena has partnered with Janus Henderson and Centrifuge to bring tokenized real world assets into USDe’s backing framework, marking the first time the digital dollar protocol has diversified its collateral holdings beyond its existing strategy.

Ethena has partnered with Janus Henderson, a $480 billion asset manager, to allocate and support the distribution of their liquid high-quality CLO tokenized funds.

As part of the partnership Janus Henderson has made a strategic investment into Ethena's governance token, will… pic.twitter.com/sJpmBVhAEQ

— Ethena (@ethena) June 9, 2026

The partnership will see Ethena allocate capital to JAAA, the tokenized Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO ETF built onchain by Centrifuge and Janus Henderson.

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The product gives Ethena exposure to institutional grade, short duration credit as part of a broader effort to expand USDe’s backing into lower risk real world assets.

Janus Henderson, which manages $480 billion in assets, also made a strategic investment in Ethena’s governance token. The asset manager plans to allocate into USDe as part of its treasury cash management strategy and is exploring ways to distribute USDe to clients through exchange traded instruments.

Guy Young, founder of Ethena, said expanding USDe’s backing to institutional grade strategies beyond basis has been a key goal since the start of 2026. He said the inclusion of JAAA would help bring high quality financial assets onchain as part of USDe’s collateral framework.

The move follows Ethena’s RWA RFP process, through which it selected Centrifuge as a strategic tokenization partner. Centrifuge will support the integration of regulated, asset manager led financial products into the USDe ecosystem.

Bhaji Illuminati, CEO of Centrifuge, said tokenization is moving beyond simply bringing assets onchain and toward enabling those assets to support new financial products and ecosystems. He said Ethena has pushed the industry forward through product innovation and that Centrifuge will support its growing real world asset strategy.

Nick Cherney, head of innovation at Janus Henderson Investors, said programmable finance can unlock value from assets currently constrained by legacy systems. He said the partnership would extend Janus Henderson’s role as a provider of tokenized assets to major digital asset protocols.

ENA, the native token of the DeFi protocol, was recently trading down nearly 3.5% over the past 24 hours, though the announcement lifted the token roughly 6% from earlier lows.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.