Ethena has announced a partnership with Binance to back its USDe stablecoin using tokenized equities, marking an expansion of the protocol's yield strategy into stock perpetuals.
The arrangement follows Ethena's established model: the protocol purchases Binance's bStocks—tokenized equities backed one-for-one by custodied shares—while shorting matching equity perpetuals to capture funding payments from leveraged long positions. This is the same hedged trade structure Ethena has used to back USDe with cryptocurrency assets since the stablecoin's launch.
Seventeen of Binance's 67 equity perpetual pairs met Ethena's qualification criteria, including Nvidia, Tesla, and SpaceX. Qualifications required $25 million in perpetual open interest over 14 days, 30 days of funding history, and a matching tokenized stock on the venue, among other conditions.
According to Ethena, Binance's equity basis has averaged approximately 11% annualized over the past six months. The exchange also provides eligible delta-neutral accounts, including Ethena's, lower priority in auto-deleveraging.
Ethena's analysis of 37 earnings events found that underlying stocks gapped an average of 9.9% while the hedged position moved 20.3 basis points, demonstrating the protective nature of the structure. Carry on the approved Binance names had declined to about 7% annualized, with two names showing negative returns.
USDe supply peaked at $14.8 billion in October 2025. The last major collateral expansion occurred in April 2024 when Ethena added Bitcoin to USDe's backing, with the stablecoin's supply at $2 billion at that time. The protocol said it expects the market opportunity in equity perpetuals to exceed the $15 billion in crypto perpetual volume it captured previously.
