In a cycle obsessed with memecoins and dog tokens, Athena Labs founder and CEO Guy Young built one of the largest and most systemically important pieces of crypto plumbing.
This feature is part of CoinDesk’s The list of most influential 2025.
In just two years, Young scaled Athena from an idea—admittedly inspired by BitMEX co-founder and crypto guru Arthur Hayes—to a $15 billion protocol by expanding aggressively, cutting distribution partnerships across exchanges and onchain locations, pushing its synthetic dollar USDe and yield-bearing sUSDe into every corner of sUSDe. The result was a new category of digital tokens or yieldcoins that live at the intersection of DeFi rails and TradFi base trades.
Nick Van Eck, founder of the stablecoin protocol AUSD, recently claimed that Athena effectively started a new era of crypto-native asset management, with dividends as the main product. Athena brought the dividend fully on-chain, opening up a popular hedge fund trade – the ETH/BTC base trade – to anyone with a wallet, wrapped in a simple $1-denominated instrument. If Van Eck is right, this could be a $500 to $1 trillion line of business over the next decade plus.
After that, Young Athena took it a step further, entering the booming stablecoin issuing business and taking on giants like Stripe and Circle. Athena is helping crypto projects like MegaETH, Sui and Solana-based Jupiter spin up their own digital dollar tokens on top of Athena’s infrastructure as stablecoins continue to break into the mainstream as one of the biggest use cases for blockchains.
