Ethena is expanding its funding trade into equity perpetuals as the protocol seeks new sources of returns after the supply of $USDe fell below $5 billion from a peak of nearly $15 billion.
The move follows Thursday’s major $ENA token overhaul, when the Ethena Foundation announced changes to $ENA’s token economics. The overhaul eliminates monthly venture capital unlocks and puts to a vote whether revenue from Ethena’s businesses should be used for token buybacks.
Ethena adapts its funding strategy to equity markets
The strategy is essentially the same trade Ethena has run since $USDe’s launch: hold exposure to an asset, short its perpetual contract and collect the funding paid by leveraged long traders. The assets involved have included bitcoin $BTC$79,389.75, ether ETH$2,496.79 and solana (SOL).
However, the trade became far less lucrative in crypto this year as prices plunged and market activity cooled. Ethena said bitcoin $BTC$79,389.75 funding averaged 11% in 2024 and 4.9% in 2025 before falling to just 2.2% this year through Aug. 11.
Equity perpetuals have shown the opposite trend. According to Ethena, funding was positive on 94% of days on Hyperliquid and 97% of days on Binance once those markets reached meaningful scale. The median equity funding rate was 13.9%, compared with 3.9% for bitcoin.
“One other interesting characteristic which makes this more attractive versus crypto is the natural positive skew of funding distribution,” co-founder Guy Young said in an X post.
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