Ethena Starts Backing USDe With Tokenized Stocks on Binance, Its First Equity Basis Venue

Ethena Labs will start backing its USDe synthetic dollar with tokenized U.S. stocks, naming Binance as the first venue for extending its basis trade into equities. Ethena announced the partnership on Friday and said allocations begin the same day.

Binance’s bStocks, which track U.S. equities and ETFs and can be converted into the underlying shares on Binance.com subject to applicable laws, will be the spot leg of the position. Ethena will hedge them by shorting Binance’s USDT-denominated equity perpetual futures, the same delta-neutral setup it has used with bitcoin, ether and other crypto assets since USDe launched.

“This is the most significant expansion of USDe’s funding mechanism since we started,” Ethena Labs founder Guy Young said in a press release. “Equities trade in the hundreds of trillions of dollars globally, and as more of that market moves onchain, we see a substantial opportunity to continue diversifying our backing strategy.”

bStocks are issued by BTech Holdings Limited, a Binance group affiliate. Holders get an interest in shares the issuer holds, not direct ownership of the stock, according to the release.

USDe has historically earned much of its yield from funding payments that leveraged long traders make to short sellers in perpetual futures markets. That income has thinned in crypto. In an August blog post, Ethena said bitcoin funding rates, weighted by open interest, averaged 11.0% annualized in 2024 before sliding to 4.9% in 2025 and 2.2% this year through Aug. 11. Binance’s equity perpetuals averaged 17.5% from May 20 to Aug. 11, the post said.

That carry has since narrowed. Kairos Research, which reviewed the trade for Ethena’s Risk Committee, said the Binance names that pass its approval test averaged roughly 18% annualized in late July and about 7% as of Aug. 26, with two of them negative.

Open interest on Binance’s equity perpetuals tops $2.9 billion and has compounded at 105% a month in 2026, the release said. Ethena said Binance also gives eligible delta-neutral accounts, including its own, lower priority for auto-deleveraging, the process an exchange uses to close profitable positions when a liquidation leaves a shortfall.

Shunyet Jan, Binance’s head of exchange and trading, said the move “is a clear sign of how the convergence of crypto and traditional assets will surface new opportunities.”

The expansion follows an approval framework from Ethena’s Risk Committee for tokenized equity basis trades. In an August report for the committee, Kairos Research proposed that a stock qualify on a venue only if its perpetual has averaged at least $25 million in one-sided open interest over 14 days, carries 30 days of funding history and has a matching tokenized stock on the same venue. Leveraged and inverse ETFs would be excluded.

Kairos recommended approving bStocks only once a side letter now being negotiated with the issuer is in place. Until that letter restricts what the issuer can do with the backing shares, the report said, the spot leg “is unsecured credit exposure to a Binance affiliate rather than a claim on the stock.”

USDe has about $4.9 billion in circulation, according to DefiLlama. Ethena overhauled USDe’s reserves in April, adding institutional lending and real-world assets. It said Friday it expects to bring the equity structure to more venues.

Related Listen: How Tokenized Stocks Could Undercut Interactive Brokers’ 77% Profit Margin

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