Ethena's ENA token rose close to 19% in 24 hours to trade near $0.2432 after the synthetic dollar protocol announced a partnership with Binance that brings tokenized equities into the collateral structure behind its USDe token.

The integration marks a step beyond crypto-native assets for Ethena. Under the new arrangement, Binance bStocks, tokenized exposures to equities, will serve as spot collateral supporting USDe. Ethena will then hedge that spot position using Binance's USDT-denominated equity perpetual futures, extending the delta-neutral basis trade the protocol has employed since USDe launched. In that structure, the protocol holds an underlying asset while using derivatives to cancel out its price risk, aiming to keep the stablecoin's backing insulated from market moves. Until now, that trade has drawn on crypto assets; equities are a new underlying for it, widening the pool of markets the strategy can source both collateral and hedges from.

In a post on X, Ethena described the partnership as its first venue for extending the basis trade into equity perpetuals:

Ethena is partnering with @Binance as our first venue for the extension of the basis trade into equity perpetuals, one of the most exciting updates to the USDe collateral backing since launch. This expands the addressable market of underlying collateral from $2.5 trillion of… pic.twitter.com/be4Mz7XHk1

— Ethena (@ethena) September 25, 2026

According to the company, the move expands the addressable market of underlying collateral from roughly $2.5 trillion across crypto assets to a market worth more than $150 trillion in real-world assets. The gap between those two figures is what gives the update its weight for a synthetic dollar protocol: it ties USDe's backing to tokenized versions of traditional equities rather than crypto assets alone. Binance's equity perpetual futures market already carries more than $2.9 billion in open interest, meaning the hedge side of the trade would operate in an already-active derivatives market rather than one built from scratch.

ENA Price Recovers Through September

The announcement landed during a steady recovery for ENA, which had traded below $0.15 for much of early September. The token closed at $0.1546 on September 17 and $0.1683 the following day, reached $0.2050 by September 19, and climbed to $0.2245 by September 24. CoinMarketCap data placed ENA near $0.27 on September 26, up about 18% that day.

Analyst Devchart highlighted the move on X, writing that $ENA is "breaking out of the main weekly resistance zones" and naming it one of the tokens to watch:

One of the tokens to watch for. $ENA breaking out of the main weekly resistance zones pic.twitter.com/foucMV42PE

— Devchart 👨🏻‍💻 (@devchart) September 26, 2026

Trading activity increased alongside the recovery, with daily volume hundreds of millions of dollars on several sessions.

Leveraged Position Adds to Market Activity

Adding to the trading activity, a trader identified as 0xc8F7 opened a 15x leveraged long position on Aster DEX. The position involved 2.15 million ENA tokens valued at about $592,000. According to Lookonchain, it was showing a profit of roughly $310,700, a 786.54% return on the trader's margin.

Analyst Crypto Patel has laid out a series of price targets for ENA based on chart structure: an initial target at $0.25, followed by $0.50, $0.80, $1.25, and $3. His post said ENA is up 292% from his original accumulation zone. These targets are based on his own technical reading of the chart, not confirmed outcomes.

The $0.25 level is currently in focus. If ENA holds above that price as support, traders may watch for a move toward the next levels in Patel's framework.

Ethena's Broader Business Continues to Grow

USDe supply stands near $4.9 billion. Ethena said its Binance equity trading averaged an annualized return of about 11% over the past six months, with open interest growing roughly 30% per month over the last three months. Those figures — collateral size, returns on the equity trade, and derivatives open interest — are the published markers through which the integration's early adoption can be followed as it moves from announcement to live operation.

Source: CoinCentral