Ethena’s entry into the U.S. stock perpetual contract pricing sector is not a blind cross-industry move, but a realistic choice based on the ongoing narrowing of crypto-native returns and the existence of liquidity premium in the U.S. derivatives market. If this strategy is implemented, it will directly reshape the competitive landscape of today’s DeFi yield market.
Ethena’s previous core business was building yield strategies around perpetual futures and spot leverage for crypto assets such as BTC and ETH. Over the past two years, as crypto market volatility has fallen and the on-chain funding-rate mid-point has continued to trend downward, the yield on its USDe stablecoin has dropped from an annualized 20%+ during the 2024 peak to the current single-digit range. The protocol’s own revenue growth has hit an obvious bottleneck, making expanding into non-crypto income sources an inevitable step to break through its growth ceiling.
In the past 12 months, the size of the U.S. stock perpetual contract market has expanded by more than three times. Daily trading volumes for perpetual products of leading individual stocks such as Tesla and Nvidia have already exceeded $10 billion on average. Funding rates for related products generally remain in the range of 8%-15% annualized, far higher than the funding rate levels of major crypto assets such as BTC and ETH. Moreover, the underlying assets’ volatility can still maintain sufficient amplitude during key periods such as Federal Reserve rate-cut cycles and corporate earnings seasons, providing ample profit space for return strategies such as arbitrage and market making. This is precisely what makes U.S. stock perpetuals a core attraction for Ethena.
The core prerequisite for this layout to truly be implemented and take effect is that Ethena can obtain market-making qualifications for U.S.-stock derivative products from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) or other relevant regulators, while also addressing compliance obstacles such as cross-chain asset settlement and user funds isolation. In addition, it must contend with competitive pressure from existing U.S.-stock derivative business platforms such as Coinbase and Binance. If it cannot break through the market access thresholds for U.S.-stock derivatives, or if the Federal Reserve restarts rate hikes and U.S. stock volatility continues to fall back to the level of current crypto assets, then the strategy’s return expectations would be significantly discounted, and it may even face liquidity risk from cross-market settlement.