Ethena (ENA), the operator of the synthetic dollar stablecoin USDe, said on the 28th it will extend its backing-asset strategy to equity perpetual futures. The protocol has traditionally held spot Bitcoin, Ether and Solana while shorting their perpetual futures to collect funding fees paid by leveraged buyers. It now plans to apply the same basis-trading structure to perpetual contracts linked to equities and commodities, broadening its potential revenue base beyond the roughly $2.5 trillion crypto market to an equity market exceeding $120 trillion. Founder Guy Young said equity- and commodity-linked perpetuals have become one of the protocol's largest growth markets. He said equities' long-term upward bias supports persistent leveraged-long demand, while funding may be less prone to compress during bear markets than in crypto. Equity perpetual open interest rose from below $1 billion in March to about $6.2 billion by August 11, while contract counts reached about 200. Funding rates were also higher than Bitcoin's, although the comparison depends on the measurement period: from May 20 through August 11, the open-interest-weighted averages were about 14% annualized on Hyperliquid and 17.5% on Binance, versus 4.1% for Bitcoin. On a year-to-date basis through August 11, Bitcoin averaged 2.2%, making equity funding 6.4 to 8.0 times higher; the same-period comparison produced a narrower 3.4-to-4.3-times range. Median equity funding was 13.9%, compared with Bitcoin's 3.9%, and positive funding occurred on 94% of days on Hyperliquid and 97% on Binance. The low daily correlation between equity and crypto funding—+0.08 on Hyperliquid and +0.14 on Binance—supports diversification, though a larger Ethena allocation could increase short-side supply and compress funding. Trading outside equity-market hours also creates questions around price formation and liquidity management. Separately, Ethena's proposed ENA buyback framework would begin when USDe supply reaches $7.5 billion, with higher allocation ratios at $10 billion, $15 billion and $20 billion. Supply was about $4.06 billion, leaving roughly $3.44 billion, or about 85% growth, to reach the first threshold. The risk committee recommended a 14-day moving average and estimated annual buybacks of about $52.7 million using historical data. Ethena's August recovery pace implied roughly 440 days, or 14 months, to reach $7.5 billion, while ENA's price had approximately doubled in 30 days. The Ethena Foundation also announced the elimination of monthly venture-capital unlocks and a vote on using business revenue for token buybacks. USDe backing has shifted toward DeFi lending at about $1.26 billion, or 30.8%, stablecoins at 32%, real-world assets at 12.3% and institutional lending at 11.8%, while the crypto basis trade fell to just over 10%. Ethena also announced a $1 billion FalconX facility for overcollateralized institutional lending. It expects real-world-asset perpetuals to exceed crypto derivatives in USDe backing within 12 to 24 months, making the ability of equity perpetuals to narrow the market-size gap a key focus for the coming quarter.