Ethena Partners With Binance to Back USDe With a Tokenized Stock Basis Trade

DeFi protocol Ethena (ENA) announced a partnership with Binance and began backing USDe with stocks on Friday, essentially buying the exchange’s bStocks and shorting its matching equity perpetuals to earn the funding that leveraged longs pay.

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

Ethena Seeks To Break Records In Crypto Perpetuals

It is the same hedged trade that has backed the $4.9 billion synthetic dollar with crypto since launch, and also the same structure that Ethena has run on Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Solana (SOL).

In other words: hold the spot asset, short the perpetual, and collect the funding that leveraged longs pay. Here, the spot leg is a bStock, issued by Binance affiliate BTech Holdings Limited and backed one-for-one by custodied shares.

Ethena said in its post on X that Binance’s equity basis has averaged about 11% annualized over the past six months, and that the exchange gives eligible delta-neutral accounts (Ethena’s among them) lower priority in auto-deleveraging.

“We expect the market opportunity size for equity perpetuals to far exceed the $15b+ of crypto perpetuals captured by Ethena last cycle,” the company wrote.

Flagging bStock Terms

The allocation follows a framework Kairos Research wrote for the Ethena Risk Committee. A name qualifies on $25 million of perpetual open interest over 14 days, 30 days of funding history, and a matching tokenized stock on the same venue, among other conditions.

Seventeen of Binance’s 67 pairs passed, Nvidia, Tesla, and SpaceX among them, on a venue holding $2.14 billion of the $2.9 billion measured across four exchanges.

Across 37 earnings events, the underlying stocks gapped 9.9% on average while the hedged position moved 20.3 basis points. Carry on the approved Binance names had halved in a month to about 7%, with two names negative. The report made bStocks approval conditional on a side letter with the issuer, because holders have no proprietary interest in the backing shares and every bStock contract sits behind a single upgrade key.

CryptoQuant data showed Binance handling 76% of the $250 billion in equity perpetual volume traded in July, and its tokenized U.S. equities reached $100 million in assets within two weeks of their June launch. ENA traded at $0.24 on Friday, up 12% in 24 hours, per CoinGecko.

USDe supply peaked at $14.8 billion on October 4, 2025, per DefiLlama. Ethena last widened the collateral this way when it added Bitcoin to USDe’s backing in April 2024, with supply at $2 billion.

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