Ethena Moves USDe Backing Into Equity Perpetuals as Yields Shrink
Ethena is moving the collateral behind USDe, its synthetic dollar, into equity perpetual futures: contracts that track a share price and never expire. The switch is a yield decision. Funding paid on those contracts averaged 14% annualised on Hyperliquid and 17.5% on Binance between 20 May and 11 August, while bitcoin's has been falling for two years. Open interest in equity perpetuals reached $6.2 billion by 11 August, ten times what it was in March. A governance vote is running at the same time that would route 95% of protocol revenue into buying ENA once USDe reaches $7.5 billion.
Two baselines, one multiple
The comparison that sells the trade depends on which bitcoin number is used. CryptoSlate, writing on Friday, set the equity figures against bitcoin funding of 2.2%, the year-to-date average, and called the gap five times. Coinpedia set the same equity figures against 4.1%, measured over the identical 20 May to 11 August window the equity numbers come from. Both readings appear inside Coinpedia's own piece as different measures of the same asset. Neither outlet flags the other's choice. The trend underneath is not in dispute: bitcoin funding averaged 11% in 2024, 4.9% in 2025 and 2.2% so far this year.
How far USDe sits from the trigger
Any buyback depends on USDe growing, and the published accounts of how much growth is needed do not line up. CryptoSlate puts supply at $4.04 billion and the shortfall at $3.46 billion, or 86%. BlockchainReporter puts supply below $5 billion and the required growth near 50%. Coinpedia, citing Ethena, reports $4.6 billion of backing assets, which counts something else again and is not comparable to either. All three published within about a day and none cites another. We could not establish which supply measure the vote itself is written against. On the peak they agree: USDe stood near $15 billion in 2025, and it has shrunk since.
What Ethena says it is chasing
The size of the target market is also two numbers. CryptoSlate gives equities as over $120 trillion against crypto at $2.5 trillion, and Coinpedia gives $166.5 trillion as of July 2026 against $2.2 trillion. Neither states a source for the total, and about $46 trillion separates them. Ethena's own arithmetic starts there: a 2.5% penetration rate on equities implies roughly $4 trillion of potential open interest, about forty times crypto's historical peak. Today the equity contracts hold $6.2 billion of open interest against $94 billion in crypto.
"Equity and commodity-linked perpetuals have become one of the protocol's biggest potential growth markets," founder Guy Young said in remarks CryptoSlate carried on Friday.
Where the risk sits
A basis trade pays while funding stays positive and the two legs stay priced together. Equity perpetuals are young markets. They can come apart, and one already has: an SK Hynix perp flash-crashed on Hyperliquid this year, on the venue carrying half the equity perpetual volume Ethena is pointing at. Roughly half of the open interest across major venues sits in memory and AI hardware contracts, a concentration that appears in Coinpedia's account alone. Ethena reports more than $30 billion of cumulative mint and redeem flows without a protocol loss, which is a record of the crypto basis trade and not of this one.
The token has already moved. ENA traded at $0.163 on Friday, up 11.6% in a day and 99% over thirty days, against a contraction in stablecoin supply that began earlier this year. The same proposal stops the monthly release of investor tokens and has the Foundation buy locked ENA from seed backers, clearing a standing overhang. Whether the fee switch ever pays anything is a separate question. One analysis carried by BlockchainReporter alone models about $26 million of annual buybacks against more than $300 million of scheduled 2026 emissions. As that outlet put it, "95% of nothing is nothing, and the trigger has not been reached."