HostWETH vs USDE — price, size and safety, side by side
WETH (Ethereum) vs USDE (Ethereum) — every figure is the freshest dated measurement we hold for that token, never a live-feed guess. Prices stamped 2026-10-17 / 2026-10-17.
WETH vs USDE — normalized performance, 2026-09-08 to 2026-10-17T03:15:24
| WETH | USDE | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $2.42K | $1.00 |
| Market cap | $5.41B | $4.80B |
| 24h volume | $462.86M DEX | $15.40M DEX |
| Liquidity | $902.53M | $13.17M |
| FDV | $5.39B | $4.80B |
| Holders | 3,680,746 | 48,976 |
| Age (days) | 1,727 | 84 |
| Safety grade | A | B |
Where they differ
- WETH measures ~69× the liquidity of USDE
- WETH measures ~30× the 24h volume of USDE
- WETH measures ~75× the holder count of USDE
What the data says
WETH
WETH is the oldest load-bearing contract in DeFi. Deployed in December 2017 as WETH9, the contract at 0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 does exactly one thing: wrap ETH — which predates the ERC-20 standard and doesn't conform to it — into a token that does, redeemable one-for-one, instantly, by anyone, forever. It has no owner, no admin functions, no upgrade path, and no pause switch. Nearly every DEX trade, lending market, and NFT sale on Ethereum has settled through it at some point; it is less a token than a piece of the chain's plumbing.
That architecture is why the usual checklist comes back almost empty. There is no team to rug, no supply policy to abuse — WETH supply is simply however much ETH is currently deposited in the contract, minted on wrap and burned on unwrap. The failure mode people theorize about (the contract holding less ETH than WETH outstanding) would require a bug that eight-plus years of the highest-value adversarial testing in crypto has not found. HostDeFi's October 9, 2026 snapshot shows roughly $903 million of tracked pool liquidity and $73 million of daily volume on this deployment, and both understate reality — WETH is one side of thousands of pools our sample doesn't enumerate.
USDE
USDe is Ethena's synthetic dollar — a stablecoin that holds its peg not with bank deposits but with a delta-neutral trade: spot crypto collateral (staked ETH, liquid stables) hedged by short perpetual futures, so the portfolio's dollar value stays flat whatever the market does. The contract 0x4c9edd5852cd905f086c759e8383e09bff1e68b3 is the canonical Ethereum deployment — USDe also exists on Solana under a different mint, where it is one of the deeper stable pools in our corpus. Our October 9, 2026 read shows $13.2 million of tracked pool liquidity on the mainnet venues.
The honest mechanics: USDe's yield is not magic — it is the funding-rate spread between staking yield and the perp market's willingness to pay longs, and that spread can and does go negative. When funding flips, Ethena pays the hedge instead of earning it, and the carry can invert into a slow bleed. The second layer is counterparty: the short positions sit on offshore exchanges through settlement custody, so exchange failures or frozen collateral are real, non-theoretical risks — the design survived the October 2025 liquidation cascade, which is evidence, not a guarantee. It is also not the same risk shape as UST: USDe is fully collateralized at inception; the failure mode is a sustained negative-funding grind plus a custody break, not a mint-redeem death spiral.
FAQ
Which is bigger, WETH or USDE?
By tracked market cap: WETH (Ethereum) measures $5.41B and USDE (Ethereum) measures $4.80B — dated snapshots, not a live feed.
Which is safer, WETH or USDE?
On the contract checks we publish: WETH (Ethereum) grades A and USDE (Ethereum) grades B. A grade is a structural check on the contract, not a promise about the asset.
How have WETH and USDE performed over the shared window?
Between 2026-09-08 and 2026-10-17T03:15:24, the measured snapshots show WETH at −2.19% and USDE at +0.07%.
The grade column is the one CMC's compare page cannot print — our grade is computed from the contract itself (mint/freeze authority, liquidity, holder concentration). Changes are measured over the shared window stated on the chart, 2026-09-08→2026-10-17T03:15:24; a token with fewer measured points measures a shorter span inside it.
Figures are dated on-chain snapshots, not a live feed. Safety grades are structural checks — not investment advice. Free · no signup · a HostDeFi product.