Ethena Adds Equity Perpetuals to USDe Backing as Crypto Funding Yields Shrink

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• Ethena will extend USDe’s collateral base into equity perpetual futures, with the first exchange partners due within a few weeks.
• Equity perpetual open interest has passed $6 billion across roughly 200 contracts, more than tenfold since March, and Ethena says the trade has averaged 15% to 20% annualized funding this year against low single digit Bitcoin funding.
• The announcement landed a day after Ethena disclosed that perpetual futures funding, once effectively its whole reserve engine, now backs just 11% of USDe, whose supply has fallen from an early 2026 peak above $14 billion to $4.04 billion today.

Ethena said Friday it is extending USDe’s delta neutral basis trade, the mechanism that generates the stablecoin’s yield, into equity perpetual futures for the first time. It will run the same short-the-perpetual, hold-the-exposure structure it already runs against Bitcoin and Ether, and expects to name its first exchange partners for the new leg within a few weeks.

A funding rate five times Bitcoin’s

The pitch is scale and yield. Equity perpetuals, contracts that let traders take leveraged long or short positions on stocks without owning the underlying shares, have grown from under $1 billion in open interest in March to more than $6 billion across roughly 200 contracts on the venues where Ethena already trades. Ethena says funding on those contracts, the periodic payment perpetual longs make to shorts, has averaged 15% to 20% annualized this year, more than five times Bitcoin’s funding rate over the same period, while running with close to no correlation to crypto funding.

“One other interesting characteristic which makes this more attractive versus crypto is the natural positive skew of funding distribution.”

The line is co-founder Guy Young’s, pointing to a structural reason for that gap: equities have a long term upward drift that keeps leveraged long demand, and the funding it pays, persistently positive in a way crypto markets do not.

Ethena frames the addressable market, over $150 trillion in global equities against roughly $2.5 trillion in crypto, as the largest scaling opportunity the basis trade has had since USDe launched, pointing to zero basis points of impairment across more than $30 billion of mint and redeem flow over two and a half years as its track record for running the trade safely at size.

The reserve mix moved first

A day earlier, Ethena disclosed a broader overhaul of what actually backs USDe, alongside its Ethena ENA buyback plan and changes to the token’s economics. Perpetual futures funding, the trade that built the stablecoin’s reputation and once amounted to effectively its entire reserve engine, has been cut to just 11% of backing.

The rest now sits in institutional lending agreements with counterparties including Anchorage Digital, Maple Institutional and Coinbase Asset Management, real world assets such as collateralized loan obligations and investment grade corporate bonds, stablecoin and DeFi positions, and prime lending to trading firms.

That realignment tracks a supply slide that on chain data confirm is still running. USDe peaked above $14 billion earlier this year, had fallen below $6 billion by early April, and stood at $4.04 billion as of Friday.

Read against that backdrop, equity perpetuals look less like Ethena doubling down on the trade that made it and more like one new leg of a reserve base it has spent months pulling away from a single point of failure, including an August 19 warehouse lending facility with FalconX. A pure chase for higher yield would not have required cutting the core trade to an eighth of the book first.

A move stablecoins have made before

Crypto has run this playbook once already. MakerDAO shifted DAI’s collateral into US Treasuries and corporate bonds in 2022 as demand for crypto native leverage dried up, trading purity for durability. Ethena’s version keeps the basis trade rather than retiring it, betting equities can make that trade durable. The Ethena ENA price surge August 22 also highlights how quickly investor sentiment around the protocol has shifted in recent weeks.

Whether that bet holds is checkable. Watch the exchange partner announcements due in the coming weeks, and whether perpetual futures funding, including the new equity leg, climbs back toward being USDe’s dominant reserve rather than staying one piece among several. That will show whether this is a genuine broadening of the model or the same concentration under a new name.