Collateral Is Not Working for Users
Perps trading has evolved a lot over the last few years. Matching engines got faster. New types of pairs are traded, such as pre-markets, commodities, and (now, increasingly) equities. Centralized exchanges pioneered portfolio margin, so that crypto collateral such as BTC and ETH can act as margin alongside stablecoins.
One thing has largely remained the same: the economics of collateral.
Most users on most exchanges have used stablecoins to margin perps. Those stablecoins earn 0% for users, while the stablecoin issuer and exchange capture the entirety of the underlying revenue and/or financing spread.
This has started to change in earnest last year. CEXs started to pass back value to users by allowing them to earn on their margin, specifically by offering rewards programs for USDe.
Exchanges such as Binance and Bybit saw billions in inflows. In addition to reducing / eliminating users’ opportunity cost of capital, USDe integration on exchanges and associated rewards programs run by the exchanges also opened up other ways to engage with users’ demands - such as passively earning rewards on idle collateral, enhancing the basis trade by adding economics to one side of the trade, or enabling compelling structured products.
HyENA is an attempt at bringing this functionality to decentralized exchanges at scale. It is based on the thesis that:
- Reward-bearing collateral / rewards programs on trading collateral should be the default for internet-native trading
- The economics of collateral should flow back to traders
- Bringing this onchain with transparency and DeFi composability unlocks a new layer of growth
Why HyENA Exists
Aligning Collateral With the Cost of Capital
There always exists an opportunity cost of capital. Professional trading desks do not fund themselves at 0%. They pay or earn a financing rate somewhere. Retail traders also have to gauge where their dollar is best treated.
Using zero-economics stablecoins as margin means:
- There’s a funding mismatch between what they earn on collateral (0%) and their financing costs
- That mismatch may get priced into markets as wider spreads
By enabling rewards for trading using USDe as collateral, HyENA:
- Frees traders from the zero‑return drag of legacy collateral
- Aligns rates earned on collateral closer to real-world financing costs
- Enables traders to pass some of that capital efficiency on to the market in the form of tighter spreads and more aggressive liquidity
HyENA Use Cases
Perps traders can trade almost exactly as on Hyperliquid: same account, same style, major pairs like HYPE, BTC, ETH, SOL, with more coming soon. The difference is that margin is USDe, so rewards accrue while trading instead of sitting as idle USDC. In addition, traders accumulate HyENA points and boosted APR on USDe margin. For active or margin-heavy traders, that combination can offset a meaningful portion of funding and fees.
For market makers or delta-neutral desks, HyENA provides a USDe-margined venue to run basis trades, cash-and-carry, and other market-neutral strategies where both margin and the hedge leg can earn. This lowers the opportunity cost of posting margin, reduces funding mismatch versus real-world financing costs, and can support tighter pricing and more stable funding over time.
For non-active traders, perps do not need to be traded directly. USDe can simply be held on HyENA to earn, with the added optionality to margin trades when the right opportunity arises. They can also deposit into the HyENA Liquidity Provider Vault (HLPe), which provides exposure to the full perps stack - rewards on USDe collateral, market making, liquidations, and a share of HyENA fees - managed by a professional vault strategist. HLPe is designed to be composable collateral across the Hyperliquid and broader DeFi ecosystem, enabling use as a core building block for yield strategies rather than an isolated product.
For builders, HyENA’s USDe-margined markets and HLPe are intended to be legos. Order flow can be routed through HyENA while offering users rewards on margin, HyENA perps can be used as the hedge leg in structured products, and HLPe can be integrated as a collateral layer inside other protocols.
HyENA’s Roadmap
Phase 1: Guarded Launch
In the initial phase, HyENA launches in a guarded, invite-only mode through referral codes so that the platform can be scaled in a controlled way. Trading starts with a focused set of major pairs such as BTC-USDe, ETH-USDe, SOL-USDe, HYPE-USDe and other large cap coins.
Phase 2: More Markets, Deeper Liquidity
Once the core experience proves stable, HyENA will expand. HyENA will add more trading pairs, including additional majors, L1s, and non-crypto perps, with open interest caps gradually raised as HLPe and organic liquidity deepen.
Risk monitoring and analytics will be improved in parallel, with more visibility into margin, liquidations, and funding dynamics for both traders and operators.
User referrals will be gradually expanded to every user once the HyENA team and community are confident in the platform’s robustness and security.
Phase 3: Long-Term, Sustainable Growth
Over the longer-term, HyENA is focused on listening to trader demand and expanding the market surface in ways that make the Hyperliquid ecosystem strictly larger.
That means prioritizing new USDe-margined pairs where there is clear organic interest, from additional majors and L1s to more “interesting” Hyperliquid-native names and long-tail assets that benefit from capital efficient collateral and HIP-3’s flexibility.
As liquidity and participation grow, HyENA’s role is to deepen these markets, tighten execution, and support more sophisticated trading and hedging workflows, so that more volume, more strategies, and more users can run through Hyperliquid.
The long-term intent is to grow the pie for everyone in the ecosystem by making USDe-margined perps a first-class, high-liquidity venue rather than a niche side product.
Hyperliquid.
HyENA is designed to sit on top of mature, high-performance infrastructure. Hyperliquid has emerged as one of the largest and fastest-growing decentralized perpetuals venues, with proven, leading matching engine, risk framework, and product velocity. This is the type of environment where USDe margin is most impactful: deep liquidity, meaningful flow, and a community of users that care about both execution quality and on-chain transparency.
HIP-3 provides the integration surface for this. Rather than attempting to bootstrap an entirely new venue, HyENA leverages Hyperliquid’s core engine and introduces native USDe collateral, with the associated economics directed back into the trading stack. The objective is not to fragment liquidity, but to expand the opportunity set for the Hyperliquid ecosystem by encouraging more risk, more capital, and more strategies to run on USDe-margined markets.
Bringing USDe margin first to Hyperliquid aligns with that goal. If collateral rewards becomes a default option on the leading decentralized perps venue, the benefits accrue not only to HyENA or Ethena, but to the broader community of traders, desks, and builders on Hyperliquid.
