Ethena Perpetual Equity Contracts: Ethena Seeks New Yield for USDe in Perpetual Equity Contracts

ethena perpetual equity contracts could become the next major source of income for Ethena: the protocol aims to shift its core strategy from the crypto market to perpetual equity futures, where funding rates this year are significantly higher than those for Bitcoin.

Key Points

• Ethena plans to expand its core USDe trades into perpetual equity futures, where funding in 2026 was several times higher than for Bitcoin.
• Open interest in such instruments has risen from less than $1 billion in March to $6.2 billion, providing the protocol with liquidity to launch a new strategy.
• For USDe, this could become a new source of income: higher funding rates, broader diversification, and less dependence on crypto market cycles.

Ethena Expands Beyond the Crypto Market

Ethena, known for its synthetic dollar USDe with a volume of around $4 billion, is seeking yield where demand for margin trading is currently growing more actively. The focus has shifted to perpetual equity futures: this market has rapidly scaled and already appears liquid enough for the protocol's familiar strategy.

Open interest in perpetual equity contracts has risen to $6.2 billion, while it was below $1 billion in March. For comparison, Ethena provides the following benchmarks for funding rates:

• Hyperliquid: around 14% in recent months.
• Binance: around 17.5% in recent months.
• Bitcoin: low single digits for the same period.

Funding rates are influenced by demand for leveraged long positions, available liquidity, volatility, and overall market conditions. When traders actively build long positions, funding typically becomes more attractive for those holding opposing short positions.

Currently, the strategy for equities is in the launch phase: Ethena expects to announce its first exchange partners in the coming weeks and roll out the initial versions of the strategy. Hyperliquid and Binance serve as benchmarks for market funding rates in this context, rather than declared exchange partners for the new strategy.

In the longer term, the team anticipates that perpetual contracts on real assets could surpass crypto derivatives in terms of USDe collateral share within 12 to 24 months. If liquidity in such instruments continues to grow, RWA-perpetuals could become a major growth avenue for Ethena rather than just a niche addition.

The Same Core Trade, But a Different Market

In this logic, a perpetual contract is a perpetual swap without an expiration date: the position can remain open as long as the trader maintains margin, and the balance between long and short positions is adjusted through regular funding payments.

A standard futures contract is structured differently: it has an expiration date and settlement for the contract. A perpetual contract does not have such a date, so the funding rate plays a key role: if demand for long positions is higher, traders with longs pay those holding shorts, and vice versa.

The process looks like this: Ethena holds a secured exposure to the asset, opens an opposing short on the perpetual contract, reduces directional risk through hedging, and receives funding payments from traders with long positions and leverage. These payments become the protocol's income; then they work into the USDe income model and can support its collateral.

In cryptocurrencies, this scheme has become less profitable. The market has cooled, prices have fallen, and demand for leverage has decreased. The dynamics of the average Bitcoin funding rate looked like this:

• 2024: 11%.
• 2025: 4.9%.
• 2026: 2.2% as of August 11.

In the equity market, the picture looks different. After reaching significant volumes, funding remained positive on 94% of days on Hyperliquid and 97% of days on Binance. The median rate for equities reached 13.9%, while for Bitcoin it was 3.9%.

Why the Equity Market Could Become Larger for USDe

The potential scale of the new direction is much larger than that of cryptocurrencies. In July, the global stock market was valued at approximately $166.5 trillion, while the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies was around $2.2 trillion. At the same time, perpetual contracts on stocks remain significantly smaller than their cryptocurrency counterparts.

For Ethena, this expansion is also important because the supply of USDe has decreased below $5 billion after peaking at around $15 billion in 2025. The protocol needs new sources of yield to regain growth and reduce dependence on a single market cycle.

At the same time, the Ethena Fund has changed the economics of the ENA token: monthly unlocks for venture investors have been canceled, and holders have been offered the opportunity to vote on the direction of Ethena's business revenues for token buybacks.

Last week, Ethena also announced a $1 billion credit line from FalconX. This can be used to support USDe in institutional loans with over-collateralization.

Such a strategy carries risks: funding rates may tighten or become negative, liquidity in new markets may be thinner than expected, and technological failures, margin requirements, and regulatory pressure could worsen the outcome.

How This Looks in Market Terms

If we describe the strategy in terms of international traders, it is a basic Trade, where key elements become Asset, Futures contract, individual Contract, Collateral (finance), and Hedge (finance). In the case of stocks, Equity (finance) is added, and demand for long positions is formed due to sustained interest in margin trading.

Ethena's main bet is simple: if funding for stocks remains strong and weakly correlated with Bitcoin funding, USDe will receive a more stable cash flow. For pegging USDe to the dollar, the combination of collateral and hedge is important: assets provide a collateral base, short perpetual positions reduce price risk, and funding payments add cash flow. For the protocol, this is an opportunity to make yield less dependent on sentiment in the cryptocurrency market and prepare for the fact that real assets will take up a larger share of collateral in the next 12 to 24 months.