Ethena's focus on USDe reserve hedges is a new course of adjustment. As the stock-renewal contract market expands rapidly this year, Ethena argues that the market offers a margin trading opportunity that may gradually outpace the traditional encryption-renewal contract and affect the subsequent reserve allocation of USDe.

The stock has continued to grow rapidly.

Ethena quoted data that the stock-for-life contract was first online in December 2025 at Hyperliquid, when the unsettled contract was about $9 million. By January 2026, Binance had also introduced Tesla-related contracts, with an initial hold of approximately $11 million.

This market was then rapidly released. By August 11, the total unsettled stock contract of several platforms had risen to $6.2 billion, about 10 times more than in March. Ethena also mentioned that the memory and AI hardware-related contracts accounted for about half of the total hold of the two platforms, indicating that funding was concentrated on science and technology topics.

Funding rates higher than bitcoin

According to Ethena, the attractiveness of a permanent contract for equities is mainly due to higher financial rates. Its basic approach is similar to that of an encrypted basis transaction, i.e., holding a spot asset while making a permanent contract to earn a leveraged amount of money.

According to data provided by Ethena, the annualized cost rate of bitcoin in 2024 was 11 per cent, fell to 4.9 per cent in 2025 and was only 2.2 per cent for the year ended 11 August 2026. In contrast, the average annualized funding rate for the Yperliquid Equator Contract, weighted at warehouse rates, was 14 per cent for the period 20 May to 11 August and 17.5 per cent for Binance and 4.1 per cent for Bitcoin during the same period.

Ethena also claims that the persistence of stocks is not strongly associated with the cost of the encryption. The daily correlation for the same period was 0.08 in Hyperliquid and 0.14 in Binance, meaning that two types of income sources were largely independent.

Ethena looks at greater market space.

In terms of size, the current stock market is still significantly smaller than encryption. According to the data in the paper, the unsettled size of the coded perpetuity contract is about $94 billion, while the stock continues at $6.2 billion. However, Ethena points out that in July 2026, the global stock market value was about 166.5 trillion dollars, well above the level of the encrypted market of about 2.2 trillion dollars.

On the basis of this gap, Ethena estimates that if the stock market had a lasting contract penetration rate of 2.5 per cent, the potential scalable size could be about $4 trillion, close to 40 times the historical peak of encryption.

For USDE, this means that the reserve hedge may no longer rely primarily on encryption for the future. Ethena states that the company has cumulatively processed more than $30 billion in casting and foreclosure flows, that no losses affecting the agreement have occurred during this period and that it has operated several billion-dollar hedge positions with off-site hosting.

Ethena expects that the future permanent configuration associated with RWA may eventually exceed the encryption configuration. The deployment of the first cooperation exchanges is expected to start in the coming weeks.