Ethena Opens a New Yield Market for USDe With Binance bStocks

• USDe’s basis strategy is expanding from crypto into tokenized equities.
• Binance bStocks provide the spot leg, while equity perps provide the hedge.
• Ethena’s approved Binance markets carried about $2.14B in one-sided open interest in August.

Ethena is beginning to deploy USDe’s basis strategy in tokenized equities, opening a source of derivatives carry that does not depend entirely on Bitcoin and crypto funding markets.

Ethena is partnering with @Binance as our first venue for the extension of the basis trade into equity perpetuals, one of the most exciting updates to the USDe collateral backing since launch.

This expands the addressable market of underlying collateral from $2.5 trillion of… pic.twitter.com/be4Mz7XHk1

— Ethena (@ethena) September 25, 2026

The first allocations begin September 25 on Binance. Ethena will hold bStocks as the tokenized spot leg and short corresponding USDT-denominated equity perpetuals, extending the delta-neutral structure already used in USDe’s backing to stocks. Binance is the first venue selected for the strategy. The Block

The attraction is not exposure to rising share prices. Ethena’s Risk Committee has been studying whether the rapidly growing market for equity perpetuals is liquid enough to provide another source of basis returns without adding substantial directional stock risk.

Ethena Wants the Funding, Not the Stock Rally

The position starts with a tokenized stock and an approximately matching short perpetual.

If the stock appreciates, gains on the bStock position are offset by losses on the short. A decline reverses those effects. The trade is constructed to minimize the directional equity exposure while collecting the funding paid by leveraged traders on the perpetual side.

Ethena has used the same basic relationship in crypto markets. What changes now is the market producing the carry.

That matters because USDe’s economics have been partly tied to demand for leverage in crypto derivatives. When perpetual funding weakens across BTC, ETH and other major assets at the same time, the opportunity set available to a crypto-only basis book narrows.

Equity perpetuals introduce funding generated by a different group of underlying assets and traders.

Binance Had $2.14B Behind the Markets Ethena Tested

Ethena did not arrive at Binance simply because bStocks were available.

An August 28 report prepared by Kairos Research for the Ethena Risk Committee examined equity perpetuals across Binance, OKX, Bybit and Kraken. The researchers measured approximately $2.9 billion in one-sided open interest and checked matching tokenized spot instruments on-chain. Ethena Governance

A market had to satisfy five conditions to qualify: at least $25 million in average one-sided open interest over 14 days, 30 days of funding history, a listed underlying security, no leveraged or inverse structure, and a matching tokenized spot asset on the same venue.

As of August 26, 17 Binance markets qualified, compared with three on OKX and none on Bybit or Kraken. Those Binance markets represented about $2.14 billion in one-sided open interest. The list included Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Strategy, SPY and QQQ, among others. Ethena Governance

The qualifying list is dynamic rather than permanent: markets can enter or leave as liquidity and open interest change.

The Carry Has Already Compressed

The Risk Committee data also provides a useful counterweight to the headline opportunity.

Approved Binance equity trades produced average annualized carry of roughly 18% in late July. By August 26, that average had fallen to approximately 7%, with two qualifying markets already showing negative carry.

Approved OKX markets were producing roughly 8% to 16%. Ethena Governance

That decline is important because it shows what happens as capital discovers a profitable basis.

More traders enter, pricing becomes more efficient and the spread being harvested can narrow. Equity basis therefore gives Ethena another market to allocate into, but it does not guarantee permanently higher returns.

The advantage is the additional opportunity set. Capital does not have to rely exclusively on crypto funding conditions if attractive spreads exist elsewhere.

The Hard Part Comes When Nasdaq Closes

Moving the strategy into stocks introduces a market-structure problem absent from BTC and ETH: the underlying equity market closes every day.

Tokenized stocks and crypto derivatives can continue trading while the reference shares are between sessions.

Earnings announcements, weekends and other overnight events can therefore produce gaps when the underlying stock is unavailable for normal price discovery.

Ethena tested precisely those periods before approving the framework.

The Risk Committee examined 37 matched earnings events, during which the underlying shares moved 9.9% on average while the hedged positions moved an average of 20.3 basis points. The worst result in the sample was a loss of 81.7 basis points. Across 400 weekend and holiday windows, average divergence was 14.9 basis points.

The committee nevertheless found a clear weak spot: newly launched tokens.

Basis dispersion ran between 41 and 48 basis points during their first two days of trading, before declining to 13.2 basis points after two weeks. The largest dislocations in the study occurred during the opening days of new markets.

Ethena’s framework consequently recommends tighter position sizing around earnings and weekends, sufficient stablecoin margin, and limits based on open interest, circulating supply, trading volume and actual order-book depth.

bStocks Add a Risk That Bitcoin Does Not Have

There is another difference between holding BTC and holding a tokenized share: the token is not the underlying security itself.

Ethena’s own review notes that bStock holders do not have a proprietary interest in the backing shares and that the issuer retains flexibility over the underlying assets and corporate actions. The Risk Committee therefore made its approval of bStocks conditional on additional protections being negotiated through a side letter.

Among the requested safeguards are confirmation of the custodian and lending restrictions, independent inventory reconciliation, access to audit reports, clearer key-management arrangements, guaranteed creation and redemption capacity, and written rules covering dividends and corporate actions.

Binance separately states that bStocks are tokenized securities offered under an ADGM-approved prospectus and are restricted to eligible users in permitted jurisdictions. Binance

Those details make the equity trade structurally different from simply replacing BTC with another liquid collateral asset. Ethena is adding issuer, custody, corporate-action and market-hours dependencies alongside the potential diversification benefits.

USDe Now Has Somewhere Else to Look When Crypto Funding Dries Up

The September 25 allocation is therefore less about putting stocks behind a synthetic dollar than about broadening the market from which USDe can extract basis returns.

Crypto remains one source. Tokenized equities now become another.

The model only works while both legs remain sufficiently liquid, the hedge tracks closely enough and the funding earned exceeds trading, financing and execution costs. Ethena’s own data already shows that attractive carry can compress quickly as markets mature. Ethena Governance

But Binance now gives Ethena something it previously lacked at usable scale: tokenized spot equities and liquid perpetual hedges on the same venue.

That turns the expansion into a test of a larger idea. USDe’s yield engine no longer has to wait exclusively for crypto traders to pay for leverage.