Ethena is expanding its USDe basis strategy beyond crypto into tokenized equities. Starting September 25, the protocol will hold Binance bStocks as the spot leg and short corresponding USDT-denominated equity perpetuals, extending its delta-neutral structure to stocks.
According to Ethena, the move broadens the addressable market for underlying collateral from roughly $2.5 trillion in crypto to more than $150 trillion in real-world assets, though that figure describes the wider opportunity, not an amount secured as USDe backing. Ethena highlighted that Binance equity basis funding averaged above 11% annualized over six months, while equity perpetual open interest grew around 30% monthly over the previous three months.
Risk Committee research for Ethena found that as of August 26, 17 Binance markets qualified for the strategy, representing about $2.14 billion in one-sided open interest, compared with three on OKX and none on Bybit or Kraken. Eligible markets included Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Strategy, SPY and QQQ. The review also showed carry compression: approved Binance equity trades averaged roughly 18% annualized in late July but only about 7% by late August, with some markets already negative.
Ethena is targeting the funding, not stock direction. The position pairs a tokenized stock with a matching short perpetual so that price moves offset. The strategy introduces new risks, including equity market closures, earnings gaps and issuer dependencies. In stress tests, 37 earnings events showed underlying shares moving 9.9% on average while hedged positions moved just 20.3 basis points, with the worst loss at 81.7 basis points. Across 400 weekend and holiday windows, average divergence was 14.9 basis points.
Because bStock holders do not have a proprietary interest in backing shares, Ethena's Risk Committee made approval conditional on additional protections negotiated through a side letter, covering custody, lending restrictions, inventory reconciliation, audit access, key management, creation and redemption, and dividend rules. Binance also assigns eligible delta-neutral accounts lower priority for auto-deleveraging, reducing one stress-scenario risk.
The September 25 allocation is a test of whether USDe’s yield engine can harvest basis returns from tokenized equities when crypto funding conditions weaken.
