Ethena is targeting the $120 trillion Wall Street stock market to hunt yields 5x higher than Bitcoin

Ethena is expanding USDe into equity perpetual-basis trades, targeting funding yields more than five times higher than Bitcoin’s as the synthetic dollar looks to recover from its 2026 contraction.

On Aug. 28, Ethena revealed plans to extend the basis strategy behind USDe into equity perpetual futures, where open interest has surged to about $6.2 billion from less than $1 billion in March. Funding rates in this market have averaged about 14% on Hyperliquid and 17.5% on Binance in recent months.

By comparison, Bitcoin perpetual funding averaged 2.2% this year through Aug. 11, down from 4.9% in 2025 and 11% in 2024.

Ethena founder Guy Young said equity and commodity-linked perpetuals have become one of the protocol’s biggest potential growth markets.

According to him, real-world asset perpetual volume exceeded half of crypto volume on Hyperliquid last month, while aggregate RWA perpetual volume on Binance reached roughly twice the volume of BTC-USDT, he said.

Young expects open interest and trading volume in the sector to surpass crypto perpetuals across major venues within roughly two years. For Ethena, the expansion increases the pool of underlying assets available to its basis strategy from a crypto market worth about $2.5 trillion to more than $120 trillion of equities.