USDe backing is entering a potentially important transition as equity perpetuals emerge as a much larger basis-trade opportunity than crypto markets. Ethena says equity perpetual futures have reached $6.2 billion in open interest across venues, while its transparency dashboard currently shows about $4.6 billion in backing assets. The numbers are still small relative to global equities, but the direction is hard to ignore.
Equity Perpetuals Are Finally Big Enough
The equity perp market wasn’t always this interesting. Contracts first appeared on Hyperliquid in December 2025 with roughly $90 million in open interest, while Binance followed in January 2026 with a Tesla contract carrying about $11 million.
That changed quickly. By August 11, aggregate equity perpetual open interest had reached $6.2 billion, a tenfold increase from March. And the demand isn’t exactly subtle: memory and AI hardware-related contracts account for roughly half of the open interest across both major venues.
For Ethena, that matters because the basis trade itself isn’t complicated. Hold the spot asset, short the perpetual, and collect the funding premium paid by leveraged longs. The same framework already applies to crypto assets.
USDe Backing Could Follow Higher Funding Rates
Here’s where things get interesting for USDe backing. Crypto funding has become considerably less attractive compared with previous years. Bitcoin funding averaged 11% annualized in 2024, fell to 4.9% in 2025 and averaged only 2.2% year-to-date through August 11, according to Ethena’s data.
Equity perpetuals, meanwhile, have been paying considerably more. From May 20 to August 11, Hyperliquid’s open-interest-weighted funding averaged 14% annualized, while Binance averaged 17.5%. Bitcoin averaged 4.1% over the same period.
Better yet, the funding streams aren’t simply moving together. Their daily correlation was just +0.08 on Hyperliquid and +0.14 on Binance, suggesting equity perpetual funding has been largely independent from crypto funding.
The Potential Market Size Is Hard To Ignore
The scale argument is even more striking. Crypto perpetual open interest currently sits around $94 billion against $6.2 billion for equity perps, but global equity capitalization reached $166.5 trillion in July 2026 versus roughly $2.2 trillion for crypto.
Ethena estimates that applying a 2.5% perpetual-open-interest penetration to equities could imply roughly $4 trillion in potential equity perpetual open interest. That’s nearly 40 times larger than crypto’s previous peak.
For USDe backing, however, the opportunity comes with execution and custody requirements. Ethena says it has processed more than $30 billion in mint and redeem flows without losses impacting the protocol, while operating multi-billion-dollar hedged books and using off-exchange custody. The company expects RWA perpetual allocations to eventually surpass crypto allocations, but the next few weeks are when the first partner exchange deployments are expected to begin.
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