The HyENA Opportunity

HyENA is a new USDe-margined perpetuals DEX on Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 platform. 

HyENA combines the high performance and user friendly features of Hyperliquid with USDe as trading collateral. HyENA’s main contributor is Based, the highest revenue Hyperliquid platform and builder of trading and prediction market interfaces. HyENA is built directly on the two core primitives of Hyperliquid and Ethena.

Trade any asset, anytime, while earning rewards on your collateral.

Users on HyENA will earn while they trade thanks to rewards on their USDe margin collateral via HyENA rewards. This functionality has proven popular on exchanges like Binance and Bybit, which saw billions of dollars of inflows and users earning tens of millions worth of rewards on their USDe collateral from those platforms when economics generated by the backing underlying alternative forms of collateral would otherwise have been internalized by stablecoin issuers. 

HyENA’s rewards on margin collateral will redefine trading on Hyperliquid and unlock an entirely new revenue stream for the Ethena ecosystem.

Case Study: USDe Collateral on CEXs

Today, users can earn passively with USDe rewards programs offered by many centralized exchanges including Binance, Bybit, Deribit, Bitget and others. USDe balances on Binance reached over $4bn in just two weeks after the integration, while on Bybit USDe balances flipped USDC and have been earning rewards for more than one year since the feature was launched. 

In total, Binance & Bybit users have received approximately $80m in USDe rewards since the integration - economics that would have otherwise been internalized by the asset issuer if users had instead opted for alternative collateral.

Since October 2024, the average Bybit USDe reward rate has been 9.2% APY. In that same period, Bybit BTC-USDT funding rate has averaged 7.5% - meaning Bybit users that elect to use USDe as margin collateral for a long BTC perp position have earned a spread of 1.7% APY by using USDe to margin long positions, rather than paying 7.5% to go long using USDT/USDC as margin. 

At present, the most important and dominant use cases for dollar assets is trading liquidity and collateral on exchanges. The moat for incumbents has always been determined via the largest exchanges and their willingness to support dollar assets on their platforms. The market for trading liquidity is currently dominated by Tether with a vast majority of perpetual pairs denominated in USDT, commanding a market size of >$80bn across all exchanges. With Tether commanding such a dominant liquidity moat, a dollar asset needs to compete on economics, not liquidity, if it is to be successful in attracting users.

USDe has completely transformed trading on centralized exchanges as the first dollar asset made available as collateral on the platform with rewards programs - now USDe will transform trading perps on Hyperliquid.

Similar to other exchange partnerships, HyENA users will be able to earn rewards paid weekly for simply holding USDe anywhere on the exchange, including within margin on perpetuals trading. 

HyENA User Economics

Collateral accounts on HyENA will be automatically productive via USDe rewards. Every day, based on the USDe collateral value within a user’s account, USDe will be directly airdropped to the user’s perp balance and can be used to top up their margin or to open new positions. 

Currently, there is over $4.2bn of USDC collateral on Hyperliquid that does not result in any rewards to users or to Hyperliquid - revenue generated on that collateral (~$200m annually) instead is internalized by Circle and generally deployed outside of the Hyperliquid ecosystem. 

Collateral balances that earn rewards on HyENA flip that dynamic on its head as users can use productive margin collateral for their trading positions. 

If all of the $4.2bn of USDC on Hyperliquid today had instead been denominated in USDe with an active rewards program since Hyperliquid launched, users would have received nearly ~$300m of rewards (assuming the rewards generally tracked sUSDe APY over the same time frame).

The below table explores the user rewards under different assumptions of the amount of USDC converted as well as under different assumed sUSDe rates. Realistic estimates of the user rewards on HyENA range anywhere from $25m to $200m by denominating the exchange in USDe with an active rewards program.

Ethena’s Fee Opportunity from HyENA

The potential trading fee share the Ethena ecosystem can earn via HyENA is substantial if HyENA can capture a respectable share of Hyperliquid’s trading volume. 45% of trading fees on HyENA are directed to the Ethena ecosystem. As of November, Hyperliquid’s monthly fees are approximately $100m. 

Hyperliquid trading fees look set to grow as the exchange likely continues to eat away at centralized exchange market share. As measured by open interest, Hyperliquid’s market share has risen from 4.8% at the start of 2025 to 11.7% today. 

Even with no growth in Hyperliquid market share, capturing a 25-50% of HyperCore flows with USDe collateral represents a very meaningful fee opportunity.

HIP-3: Increasing Ethena’s Addressable Market

HIP-3 marked a pivotal moment in crypto’s convergence with traditional financial markets. The expansion of onchain perpetual futures from crypto-native assets to traditional equities and other non-crypto assets represents a fundamental shift in the addressable market for crypto exchanges. With just crypto-native assets, Hyperliquid was fighting for a highly competitive $3tn market. With equity perps, commodities, and pre IPO markets (among others), Hyperliquid is enabling access to a vastly larger $100tn global equity and derivatives market - increasing USDe’s addressable market by extension.

By all metrics, HIP-3 has thus far been a clear success: clearing $500m in daily volume, driven almost exclusively by equity perps. 

While Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 provides the permissionless rails that enable HIP-3 markets to launch, USDe will create the economic incentive structure necessary to make these markets liquid and viable for users. By shifting the collateral model from passive stablecoins yielding no economics to USDe collateral accounts receiving rewards, HyENA unlocks a new level of capital efficiency for HIP-3 traders.

For example, the most popular HIP-3 market by volume today is XYZ100: a perpetual future that tracks the value of an index of 100 large non-financial companies listed on a U.S. exchange. The funding rate on XYZ100 is 10.95%, meaning any long positions pay shorts 10.95% annually. Were that trade to take place on HyENA, with USDe as collateral and assuming a rewards rate of 6%, the long position would instead only pay approximately 5% - with a since inception sUSDe APY of ~10%, the cost of holding the position open at baseline funding would merely be basis points.

HyENA and USDe will be the catalyst for a new era of cost-effective leverage, proving that the most capital efficient place to trade any financial assets in the world is no longer Wall Street, but onchain.