Ethena is moving its next growth bet into equity perpetuals.
On Aug. 28, the company said it plans to transplant the crypto spot-perpetual basis trade into the market for stock perpetual contracts. The model is the same in principle: hold the underlying asset and short perpetuals to collect funding. In Ethena’s framing, the addressable scale could reach $4 trillion, roughly 40 times the peak size of crypto arbitrage.
The timing matters. A day earlier, Ethena said circulating USDe had fallen from a 2025 peak near $15 billion to about $4 billion now, a drop of more than 70%.
USDe shrank from nearly $15 billion to around $4 billion
USDe maintains its $1 peg with a hedged structure. Ethena buys spot crypto assets such as Ether and opens matching short positions in perpetual futures. Funding paid by leveraged longs to shorts is the product’s main source of income, and that income has supported double-digit annualized returns for staked sUSDe holders.
In 2024, average Bitcoin funding ran at about 11% annualized. USDe expanded quickly in that environment, and supply climbed to nearly $15 billion. In 2025, annualized Bitcoin funding dropped to 4.9%. Through Aug. 11, 2026, the year-to-date average had fallen again to 2.2%, less than one-fifth of the 2024 level.
On Oct. 10, 2025, during a $19 billion-scale crypto market crash, USDe briefly lost its peg on Binance and traded as low as $0.65. The article says that move was mainly tied to abnormalities in Binance’s order book and pricing mechanism at the time, while on-chain markets did not see a depeg of the same magnitude. After that, USDe supply kept contracting, sliding from about $15 billion at the peak to roughly $4 billion today.
Risk research firm Hindenrank estimated that Ethena’s reserve fund, at about $62 million, covers only around 1.4% of USDe supply. In the Ethena stress scenario cited by Hindenrank, if funding rates stay negative, the reserve fund could be depleted in roughly 52 days.
Equity perpetuals offer higher funding than Bitcoin
As of Aug. 11, total open interest in equity perpetuals stood at $6.2 billion, more than 10 times the level seen in March. Over the same period, average annualized funding rates on stock perpetuals were 14% on Hyperliquid and 17.5% on Binance, compared with about 4.1% for Bitcoin. On that basis, equity-perpetual funding was roughly three to four times higher than Bitcoin funding.
The article also says the correlation between equity-perpetual funding and crypto funding is close to zero. For Ethena, that is the central point: it would add a source of revenue that is relatively independent of the Bitcoin cycle.
On Aug. 27, one day before unveiling the equity-perpetual plan, the Ethena Foundation separately proposed a tokenomics overhaul. Once USDe supply reaches the governance threshold of $7.5 billion, 95% of protocol net revenue would be used to buy back ENA. The article notes that the buyback plan does not depend on any one business line, but if equity perpetuals bring in incremental capital, they could help USDe reach that threshold faster.
Against the current USDe supply of about $4 billion, the $7.5 billion trigger sits roughly 85% higher. The governance vote closes on Sept. 2. Even if approved, the first buyback would not begin until USDe actually reaches $7.5 billion.
Hyperliquid and Binance could benefit as well. In the stock-perpetual segment, contracts tied to memory and artificial-intelligence hardware account for nearly half of open interest across the two platforms, according to the article. A large Ethena entry could alter both liquidity and funding-rate structure in that market.
For sUSDe stakers, the revenue mix would also change. If the plan goes ahead, part of their yield would come from a stock-perpetual market with less than one year of history, rather than relying only on a crypto basis trade that has operated for two and a half years and lived through a full bull-bear cycle.
Regulatory classification is still unsettled
The legal characterization of equity perpetuals remains unclear. The underlying reference is a stock, but the contract itself carries features associated with futures and swaps. That leaves open whether the instruments should be treated as security futures, security-based swaps, or another derivative category.
On Aug. 24, the Hyperliquid Policy Center submitted comments to two agencies and argued that cash-settled stock perpetuals that resemble traditional futures should fall under the existing joint framework for security futures. The Blockchain Association filed a similar submission on Aug. 25. The comment process has ended, but the two agencies have not issued a conclusion.
Hyperliquid still does not serve U.S. users. President Donald Trump said publicly on Aug. 19 that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair was working to bring Hyperliquid into the U.S. market in a compliant form. As of Sept. 2, however, there was still no visible license, approval path, or implementation timeline. In other words, the main venues in the $6.2 billion market Ethena wants to enter remain outside the U.S. regulatory system and are not open to U.S. retail users.
Ethena previously achieved what it described as zero-basis-point impairment across more than $30 billion of mint and redemption flow. That record was built in crypto derivatives, a market with years of operating history and comparatively clearer regulatory boundaries. Whether the same record can carry over into a market that has not yet been clearly classified is still an open question in the article.
Ethena’s revenue mix is changing
Ethena’s view is that within the next 12 to 24 months, revenue from real-world-asset-linked perpetuals will exceed revenue from crypto perpetuals and become the main source of yield for USDe collateral.
On Aug. 27, Ethena disclosed that funding from crypto perpetuals now accounts for 11% of its collateral composition. That share has moved sharply. Around two weeks before the announcement, it had briefly dropped to 1%, then rebounded to about 13% as market sentiment improved. Even so, compared with the period when crypto funding carried almost all of USDe’s revenue, its weight has clearly diminished. Income sources are spreading across stablecoins, RWA, and institutional credit, according to the article.
USDe was first sold as a crypto-native high-yield dollar, with returns tied to the leverage structure unique to digital-asset markets. The next step, as described here, is to convert demand from retail and institutions for leveraged single-stock exposure into a redeemable on-chain dollar asset.
As long as funding in equity perpetuals remains attractive, Ethena can turn that spread into incremental revenue for USDe. That part of the thesis can work immediately. The harder question is how long the yield lasts.
Stock perpetuals have less than a year of trading history and have not yet faced a true stress event. There is another complication: Ethena itself could compress the opportunity. If more arbitrage capital floods in, larger spot-long and perpetual-short positions could steadily thin out the spread, much as Bitcoin funding compressed from 11% to 2.2%.
Ethena needs an active equity-perpetual market to earn elevated yields. But by entering at scale, it could also flatten those yields on its own. Whether this expansion can turn a cyclical window into a durable source of revenue for USDe remains unanswered.
