Ethena USDe Audit Reveals Critical Reentrancy and Access Risks
Ethena USDe (USDe)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
dev.to published a security audit report on 2 October 2026 regarding Ethena’s USDe stablecoin. The review identified a high combined risk score of 7 out of 10 for the protocol’s smart contracts. USDe currently holds approximately $4.9 billion in total value locked across Ethereum L1 and several L2 roll-ups including Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync.
The audit highlighted a critical reentrancy vulnerability within the withdraw() path of the Vault contract. Additionally, unrestricted admin rights on the USDeProxy upgradeable contract present a single point of failure. These weaknesses could theoretically lead to a total loss of user funds if exploited through coordinated attacks.
The report recommends migrating to a multi-sig and timelock upgrade pattern to mitigate these risks. It also suggests restricting the Controller.setCollateralRatio function to a DAO-governed role with a minimum ratio floor. Furthermore, the audit advises adding checks to Bridge.setL2Bridge and introducing withdrawal limits for the Treasury. Despite these issues, the rest of the codebase follows best practices using OpenZeppelin libraries.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for USDe, measured when this story was written up on 2 October 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
Whalio spot data for USDe shows a price of $0.9999 with a 1-hour buy ratio of 61.8%. This short-term buying pressure contrasts with a 4-hour buy ratio of 52.0% and a significantly lower 24-hour ratio of 24.3%. Volume deltas indicate a shift from net selling in the longer term to net buying in the immediate hour. Specifically, the 1-hour volume delta is positive at $1,009, while the 24-hour delta is negative at -$1,619,679. The buy ratio represents the proportion of trades executed by buyers versus sellers, indicating current market sentiment. Positive volume delta signifies that buying volume exceeds selling volume during that period.
The latest daily buy ratio of 51.8% sits at the 56th percentile of the last 322 days, against a median of 48.5% - ordinary for this coin.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for USDe, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, the 7-day average buy ratio was 53.2%, which is higher than the current 24-hour reading of 24.3%. This represents a drop of 28.9 points from the weekly average, suggesting a recent cooling of buying interest. Volume activity has been elevated, with 24-hour volume being 2.83 times the weekly average. While the 24-hour period saw net selling of -$1,619,679, the 8-day total volume delta was only -$122,311. This indicates that the recent selling pressure is an anomaly compared to the broader weekly trend. The price has remained stable at a 0.0% change over the eight-day period despite these volume fluctuations.