Ethena Moves Part of USDe's Backing Into Binance Stock Tokens

Ethena has started backing part of its synthetic dollar with tokenized shares. The protocol said on Friday that it is running a basis trade on Binance using equities for the first time: hold the exchange's bStocks as spot collateral, short an equal amount of Binance's dollar-denominated equity perpetual futures, and take the funding and the spread between the two legs. The structure is the one USDe already runs against bitcoin and ether. What is new is the collateral. Ethena has not said how much of its backing the trade takes, or which shares it holds.

How the trade is put together

A basis trade is delta-neutral, built so the price of the underlying asset does not decide whether it makes money; the return comes out of the gap between spot and futures. bStocks are Binance's tokenized equities, launched on 11 June, each described as backed one-for-one by shares held with a regulated custodian and convertible to the underlying around the clock where jurisdiction allows. The interest sits with BTech Holdings Limited. Binance also gives delta-neutral accounts a lower auto-deleveraging priority, which is the exchange's practice of force-closing a profitable position to cover another trader's losses. That last point is carried by The Crypto Times alone.

Two readings of the same six months

How well the equity trade has paid is where the accounts split. The Block, which had the story first on Friday morning, puts the average equity basis over the past six months at 3.56% annualized. The Crypto Times says performance averaged more than 11% annualized over the same six months, and The Coin Republic repeats about 11%. A basis and a strategy return are not the same quantity. No account says which one it is quoting, and they do not reconcile.

The growth figures split the same way. The Block attaches 105% compound monthly growth to Binance's equity perpetuals. CryptoDaily attaches 105% compound monthly to bStocks during 2026. The Crypto Times and The Coin Republic both give open-interest growth as about 30% a month across the previous three months. One series cannot grow at both rates.

What sizes are on the record

USDe supply is about $4.9 billion, on The Block's figure. Binance equity perpetual open interest is about $2.9 billion, a number three of the four accounts carry. CryptoDaily alone puts bStocks outstanding at $565.9 million at the end of July, and The Block alone reports $433.4 billion of perpetual volume on traditional assets in August, of which $342.9 billion was equities. Both stand on one account each. Against those, the market Ethena describes itself as reaching for is a different order of size: about $2.5 trillion of crypto collateral today against more than $150 trillion of real-world assets.

"This is the most significant expansion of USDe's funding mechanism since we started," Guy Young, Ethena Labs' founder, said.

The risks Ethena lists itself

The protocol named four things that make the equity version harder than the crypto one: how closely a tokenized stock tracks the security behind it, perpetual funding rates, liquidity, and how regulators treat equity-linked derivatives. Its risk committee signed off on the framework before any allocation went out. Equities also stop trading, which bitcoin does not, and none of the accounts read here says what happens to the hedge over a weekend or a market holiday.

Tokenized shares keep turning up as collateral. Aave opened a market on Base on Friday that takes seven Coinbase equity tokens against USDC loans, and Coinbase has separately filed with the CFTC for more than 50 single-stock perpetuals. ENA rose on the news, though by how much is unclear. The Coin Republic's headline says 17% and its own text says about 19.04% over 24 hours, near $0.2432. That outlet disagrees with itself, and no other account in this sweep gives a figure. The number that would settle how much any of this matters is the size of the allocation, and Ethena has not published it.