ENA rallies 16% as Ethena partners with Binance to extend USDe basis trade into equity perpetuals

Ethena (ENA) Labs announced Friday it partnered with Binance to expand its USDe delta-neutral trading strategy into equity perpetuals.

Ethena partners with Binance equity markets to expand basis trading strategy

Binance will serve as Ethena’s first venue for equity perpetuals. Under the partnership, the company will hedge bStocks — tokenized shares of publicly listed companies — with USDT-denominated equity perpetual futures on Binance.

The structure follows the same market-neutral approach Ethena has used in crypto markets. The protocol holds the spot asset while taking an offsetting perpetual futures position, allowing it to capture funding payments from leveraged traders while limiting exposure to the underlying asset’s price movements.

The protocol said the expansion could increase the addressable market for its underlying collateral from roughly $2.5 trillion in crypto assets to more than $150 trillion in real-world assets.

Binance provides lower Auto-Deleveraging (ADL) priority for eligible delta-neutral accounts, including Ethena’s, which it considers an additional risk-management feature for the strategy.

According to Ethena, equity perpetual funding rates on Binance have averaged more than 11% annualized over the past six months. Open interest in the market has also increased by roughly 30% per month over the past quarter.

The expansion follows a review by Ethena’s Risk Committee, which assessed the liquidity and market structure of tokenized equity perpetuals before approving the strategy.

Under the framework, an equity perpetual must maintain at least $25 million in one-sided open interest on a 14-day average and have at least 30 days of funding-rate history. The underlying asset must also be a publicly-listed security and cannot be a leveraged or inverse product.

Ethena’s screening process approved 17 assets from Binance’s 64 matched pairs. The list includes major publicly-traded companies such as Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Meta Platforms, Alphabet and Intel, as well as selected exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The Risk Committee approved bStocks as the strategy's primary spot instrument, subject to a side agreement covering custody, corporate actions and dividend treatment.

The protocol also plans to maintain transparency around the new collateral strategy. Its existing dashboards will continue to provide line-by-line details of USDe’s collateral composition, allowing users to monitor how assets backing the synthetic dollar are allocated.

ENA is trading at $0.256, up 16% in the past 24 hours and 90% over the past month at the time of writing.