Ethena started running USDe’s basis trade on tokenized U.S. stocks, with Binance as the first venue. The position pairs Binance bStocks with short equity perpetuals. Equity perpetual funding
On September 25, Ethena began extending the basis strategy behind its USDe synthetic dollar into tokenized U.S. equities, using Binance as the first execution venue. The protocol buys bStocks, Binance’s tokenized share products, and shorts matching USDT-margined equity perpetuals on the same exchange. It collects the funding that leveraged longs pay and hedges out price moves in names such as Nvidia and Tesla. The timing reflects a problem Ethena has been working on all year: crypto funding, the income source USDe was built on, has shrunk to a fraction of its 2024 level, and the protocol wants a yield engine that does not depend on crypto speculation.
The construction mirrors the original USDe design. If Ethena buys $10 million of tokenized Nvidia and shorts $10 million of Nvidia perpetuals, gains on one leg offset losses on the other. Ethena does not care whether Nvidia rises. It earns the spread that traders pay to hold leveraged long positions.
What changes is the asset universe. Ethena’s Risk Committee reviewed equity perpetual markets on Binance, OKX, Bybit and Kraken and found about $2.9 billion of one-sided open interest as of August 26. Binance held roughly $2.14 billion of that. Seventeen Binance instruments passed Ethena’s filters, including Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Micron, SK Hynix, Strategy, Circle, SPY and QQQ. OKX had three. Bybit and Kraken had none.
The eligibility rules explain the gap. A stock needs at least $25 million in one-sided perpetual open interest on a 14-day average, 30 days of funding history, a listed underlying security and a matching tokenized spot asset on the same exchange. Leveraged and inverse products are excluded. The same-venue rule keeps both legs under one margin system and removes a layer of cross-exchange execution risk.
Binance’s own moves strengthened the case. Its equity perpetual open interest has now passed $2.9 billion, and two days before Ethena’s launch the exchange widened the use of bStocks as portfolio-margin collateral.
Ethena announced the equity strategy on August 28, after equity perpetual open interest across the market jumped from under $1 billion in March to about $6.2 billion in August. Funding rates on those contracts ran well above crypto levels.
Equity perps vs Bitcoin: annualized funding Data: Ethena, FXStreet Binance equity perps~17.5% Hyperliquid equity perps~14% Median equity perp~13.9% Bitcoin, 2024~11% Bitcoin, 2025~4.9% Bitcoin, 2026 (to Aug. 11)~2.2% Equity perpetuals Bitcoin perpetualsEquity funding stayed positive on roughly 94% of days on Hyperliquid and 97% on Binance once those markets reached scale, and Ethena measured its correlation with crypto funding at close to zero. For a product whose supply fell from a peak near $15 billion to below $5 billion as crypto funding dried up, an uncorrelated income stream has direct value.
The rates are not stable, though. Binance’s approved names averaged about 18% annualized in late July and slipped toward 7% by late August, with two instruments turning negative. Over the past six months, Ethena puts the average equity basis at about 3.56% annualized.
Before approval, the Risk Committee commissioned Kairos Research to stress the trade. Across 37 earnings events, the underlying shares moved 9.9% on average, while the hedged position moved about 20.3 basis points. The worst case was roughly -81.7 basis points. Across some 400 weekend and holiday windows, average divergence between the legs was 14.9 basis points.
Newly listed tokens behaved worse. Basis dispersion ran at 41 to 48 basis points in a token’s first two days and settled near 13.2 basis points after two weeks, which is one reason the framework demands 30 days of history.
The sharper risk sits in market hours. U.S. equity markets are closed for about 70% of the week, while perpetuals keep trading. During those hours the perpetual’s index leans on crypto-venue pricing, so a sharp move in a thin market could liquidate Ethena’s short before the offsetting tokenized-stock gain can be sold at size. Ethena listed extra weekend margin and closing positions before Friday’s close as possible controls.
Binance launched bStocks in June. BTech Holdings Limited, a Binance affiliate, issues them, and each token is backed 1:1 by a U.S. share held with a regulated custodian. Holders get economic exposure, 24/7 trading and the option to withdraw to BNB Smart Chain, but they do not become registered shareholders.
Ethena’s committee flagged this directly. Holders have no proprietary interest in the underlying shares, and the issuer keeps broad discretion over assets and corporate actions. Approval came conditional on a side letter covering custody and lending restrictions, independent inventory reconciliation, audits, key management, redemption access, dividends and corporate-action methodology.
The regulatory backdrop shifted on September 17. On September 17, the SEC issued its Innovation Exemption for tokenized NMS stocks, which lets qualifying venues run permissioned onchain trading through AMM pools until September 17, 2031. That framework requires tokens to carry rights equivalent to the traditional security. Certificate-style products such as bStocks and Kraken’s xStocks, which provide exposure without ordinary shareholder rights, sit outside that model.
Equity basis is the latest step in a year of diversification. By June, crypto basis made up only about 1% of USDe backing.
USDe backing breakdown June 2026 · Data: Ethena Governance 1% crypto basis share DeFi lending46.0% Liquid stablecoins35.0% RWA (tokenized CLOs)11.2% Institutional lending6.9% Crypto basis1.0%The RWA slice came from about $501 million in two AAA-rated tokenized CLO funds, Janus Henderson’s JAAA via Centrifuge and Securitize’s STAC, with a separate $250 million commitment to STAC. On August 19, Ethena and FalconX opened a $1 billion secured facility that routes USDe backing into overcollateralized institutional loans. USDe also became a supported asset on BlackRock’s Aladdin platform, and Ethena backs a $100 million liquidity facility for BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.
That diversification adds moving parts. USDe now carries custody, credit, smart-contract, lending and market-structure exposure across several counterparties, rather than one hedged crypto position.
Founder Guy Young expects RWA perpetual allocations to exceed crypto perpetual allocations in USDe backing within 12 to 24 months, arguing that the addressable pool grows from about $2.5 trillion in crypto assets to more than $150 trillion. No venue data yet supports that timeline.
OKX is the most likely second venue. It already lists about $585 million across 155 equity perpetual contracts, though only three passed Ethena’s filters in August. The committee rated xStocks’ disclosures favorably, citing named custodians, onchain proof of reserves and NAV redemption. RWA.xyz puts the tokenized-stock market at about $2.92 billion, with Ondo near $837 million and bStocks near $685 million.
The fee switch, approved by ENA holders in early September, sends 95% of Foundation net revenue to ENA buybacks, but only after USDe supply reaches $7.5 billion. At about $4.90 billion on DeFiLlama, up roughly 19.8% in 30 days, USDe is still around $2.6 billion short of that trigger.
In early September, Ethena also launched Ethena Pay, a self-custodial payments app on Avalanche available in 48 countries, and on September 11 it brought USDe and sUSDe to TRON. Equity basis adds yield capacity, while those channels are meant to create demand for the dollar that capacity supports.
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