USDe's size halved; Ethena bets on the stock perpetual contract market.

On August 28th, Ethena announced it would be bringing its cryptocurrency spot-perpetual contract strategy—"holding spot and selling perpetual contracts to earn funding fees"—to the stock perpetual contract market. Theoretically, this could reach a market size of $4 trillion, nearly 40 times the peak of cryptocurrency arbitrage. Just the day before, Ethena stated that the circulating supply of its USDe had fallen from a peak of nearly $15 billion in 2025 to approximately $4 billion now, a drop of over 70%. USDe maintains its $1 peg through a hedging structure: buying Ethereum and other crypto assets in the spot market while simultaneously opening an equal number of short positions in the perpetual contract market. Long positions must pay funding fees to short positions to maintain leveraged holdings. This fee is USDe's main source of revenue and the basis for its ability to offer double-digit annualized returns to sUSDe stakers. In 2024, Bitcoin funding fees averaged approximately 11% annualized, and USDe expanded rapidly in this high funding fee environment, with supply surging to nearly $15 billion. However, in 2025, Bitcoin's annualized funding fee rate fell back to 4.9%, and as of August 11, 2026, the annual average was only 2.2%, less than one-fifth of the 2024 level. On October 10, 2025, during a $19 billion crypto market crash, USDe briefly de-pegged to $0.65 on Binance. However, this price was primarily due to anomalies in Binance's order book and pricing mechanism at the time; the on-chain market did not experience a similar level of de-pegging. Since then, the supply of USDe has continued to shrink, from a peak of approximately $15 billion to its current level of around $4 billion. According to calculations by risk research firm Hindenrank, Ethena's current reserve fund of approximately $62 million can only cover about 1.4% of the USDe supply; under the Ethena stress test scenario cited by Hindenrank, if funding rates remain negative, the reserve fund could be depleted within approximately 52 days. The perpetual stock contract business was launched against this backdrop. The triumph of perpetual stock contracts. As of August 11, the total open interest in perpetual stock contracts reached $6.2 billion, more than 10 times that of March. During the same period, the average annualized funding rates for stock perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid and Binance were 14% and 17.5% respectively, while the funding rate for Bitcoin was approximately 4.1%. The funding rate for stock perpetual contracts was about 3 to 4 times that of Bitcoin, and its correlation with cryptocurrency funding rates was close to zero—this correlation is what Ethena really wants to emphasize, because it means that this income provides a source of revenue that is relatively independent of the Bitcoin cycle. On August 27th, just one day before the perpetual stock contract plan was announced, the Ethena Foundation released another token economics reform plan: Once the USDe supply reaches the governance threshold of $7.5 billion, 95% of the protocol's net revenue will be used to buy back ENA. These two announcements were made separately, and the buyback plan itself does not depend on any specific business path—however, if the perpetual stock contract business can bring in incremental funds, it will objectively allow USDe to reach this threshold faster. This threshold is about 85% higher than the current $4 billion, and it is also a figure set by Ethena itself. The governance vote on this ends today (September 2nd), but even if the vote passes, the first buyback will not be triggered until the USDe size actually reaches $7.5 billion. Hyperliquid and Binance are also beneficiaries. In the perpetual stock contract market, memory and AI hardware-related assets account for nearly half of the open interest on both platforms. If Ethena enters the market on a large scale, it could further alter the liquidity and funding rate structure of this market. The situation for sUSDe stakers is about to change: if this plan is implemented, their revenue streams will be further integrated into a perpetual stock contract market that is less than a year old, instead of relying solely on cryptocurrency basis trading, which has been operating for two and a half years and has experienced a complete bull and bear cycle.

 Regulatory Uncertainty, Funds FirstThe classification of stock perpetual contracts has always been awkward: the underlying asset is stocks, but the contract itself has the characteristics of futures, swaps, and other derivatives. Therefore, whether it belongs to securities futures, securities swaps, or other derivative categories remains a regulatory dispute.. On August 24, the Hyperliquid Policy Center submitted opinions to two major institutions,suggesting that cash-settled stock perpetual contracts, which meet the characteristics of traditional futures, be included in the existing joint regulatory framework of "securities futures"; the Blockchain Association also submitted similar opinions on August 25.

The consultation period has ended, but neither of the two agencies has yet reached a conclusion. Hyperliquid remains closed to US users. President Trump publicly stated on August 19 that the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was pushing for Hyperliquid to enter the US market compliantly, but as of September 2, no concrete licenses, approval pathways, or timelines have been seen. The $6.2 billion market that Ethena intends to enter has its main trading venue neither within the US regulatory system nor open to US retail users. Ethena has previously achieved "zero-basis-point impairment" in over $30 billion in minting and redemption transactions. This record was established in the cryptocurrency derivatives market—a market that has been operating for many years with relatively clear regulatory boundaries. Whether this record can be transferred to a new market that is not yet defined is uncertain. Ethena predicts that within the next 12 to 24 months, income from perpetual contracts related to real-world assets will surpass that of cryptocurrency perpetual contracts, becoming the primary source of income for USDe collateralized assets. On August 27th, Ethena disclosed that the funding rate for cryptocurrency perpetual contracts now accounts for 11% of the collateralized assets. This percentage itself fluctuates significantly, having fallen as low as 1% in the two weeks prior to the announcement, before rebounding to around 13% as market sentiment improved. However, compared to its former status as almost the sole contributor to USDe's revenue, its importance has clearly declined, with revenue sources diversifying towards stablecoins, RWA, and institutional lending. USDe initially sold "crypto-native high-yield dollars," profiting from the leverage structure unique to the cryptocurrency market. What it plans to do now is to convert the demand for leveraged exposure to individual stocks from retail and institutional investors into an on-chain USD asset that can be redeemed at any time. As long as the funding rate for perpetual stock contracts remains attractive, Ethena can turn this money into new yields in USDe—this step is feasible now. The real question is, how long can this high yield be sustained? Perpetual stock contracts have less than a year of trading history and haven't yet experienced truly extreme market conditions. More subtly, Ethena itself could become a variable that suppresses this business: if it brings in more arbitrage funds, the larger the scale of long spot and short perpetual contracts, the thinner the arbitrage space in the market will become—just like how Bitcoin's funding rate has been compressed from 11% to 2.2%. Ethena needs a sufficiently hot stock perpetual contract market to achieve high returns, but its entry itself may erase those high returns. Whether this expansion can ultimately turn a temporary trend into a long-term source of revenue for USDe remains to be seen.