The parts that make this work
A synthetic dollar
USDe is a token issued by Ethena Labs that aims to stay at one US dollar without dollars in a bank behind it. Its backing is a mix of stablecoins and crypto assets, and every crypto asset is paired with a short futures position of the same size. If ETH rises, the ETH is worth more and the short loses the same amount; if ETH falls, the reverse. The pair is "delta-neutral": its dollar value doesn't depend on the price.
USDe launched in February 2024. Its supply peaked close to $15 B in early October 2025 and had fallen to about 4.87 B by September 30, 2026, the totalSupply of the Ethereum contract that day.
Minting and redeeming
Only whitelisted firms mint and redeem directly. A firm asks Ethena's pricing service for a quote, signs an order, and the minting contract on Ethereum takes its collateral and mints USDe in one transaction; Ethena then adjusts its hedges. Redemption runs the other way. Everyone else buys and sells USDe on exchanges and on-chain markets, and the firms' ability to mint above $1 and redeem below it is what holds the price.
A mint shows up on-chain as a transfer from the zero address and a burn as a transfer to it. Live mode reads both on Ethereum, which is also where cross-chain moves are locked and released.
What backs USDe
Ethena publishes the backing on its transparency dashboard and has monthly custodian attestations. At 18:59 UTC on September 30, 2026 the dashboard's data showed $4,877,171,863 of backing assets against about 4.87 B USDe. Four fifths was stablecoins; Ethena's documentation names USDC, USDT and USDtb as the liquid stablecoins it holds.
USDe backing, September 30, 2026
| Asset | US dollars |
|---|
| Liquid stablecoins ("liquid cash") | 3,949,053,703 |
| BTC, hedged | 486,945,111 |
| ETH and staked ETH, hedged | 374,434,351 |
| SOL, XRP, BNB and gold, hedged | 66,738,698 |
| Total backing | 4,877,171,863 |
By venue, $650 M of it was margin for positions on Binance, $202 M on OKX, $112 M on Bybit, $19 M on Deribit and $8 M on Coinbase's derivatives exchange; the other $3.89 B wasn't allocated to an exchange.
These figures change hourly and are not read live here: the page shows them as they were at that time. Sources: Ethena transparency dashboard and the data behind it, ethena.fi/api/positions/current/collateral; Ethena docs: liquid stablecoins.
Custody off the exchanges
The crypto collateral doesn't sit on the exchanges where the shorts are open. It's held by off-exchange settlement providers, which Ethena's documentation names as Copper and Ceffu among others; the exchange sees the balance and lends against it as margin, and profits and losses are settled between them regularly. Ethena's monthly custodian attestations state that none of the backing assets sit directly on an exchange. If an exchange failed, Ethena would lose that exchange's unsettled profit and have an unhedged position to replace, but not the collateral itself.
sUSDe: where the yield goes
Staking USDe in the sUSDe contract (an ERC-4626 vault) gives a share whose value in USDe only rises. Ethena sends rewards in every 8 hours, and each payment vests over the next 8 hours. The income comes from funding and basis on the shorts and rewards on the stablecoins. On September 30, 2026 the contract held 1.27 B USDe for 1.01 B sUSDe, so 1 sUSDe was worth 1.2508 USDe, and unstaking had a one-day cooldown. Ethena put the 30-day average sUSDe yield at 4.87 % on September 23. Live mode reads the contract and its reward payments directly.
What can go wrong
Negative funding. If shorts pay longs for long enough, income turns into a cost. Ethena's reserve fund, $62 M on September 30, 2026, is meant to cover that. Ethena's own analysis of three years of data found negative-funding streaks of at most 13 days.
Exchanges and custodians. USDe depends on a handful of exchanges and custodians working. On October 10–11, 2025, during a crash that liquidated about $19 B of positions, USDe traded as low as $0.65 on Binance for roughly 90 minutes while staying near $1 on other venues. Binance priced it from its own thin order book; Ethena said minting and redemption kept working and about $2 B was redeemed that day. Supply fell by more than half over the following months.
New collateral. On September 25, 2026 Ethena said it would also back USDe with tokenised US shares (Binance's bStocks) hedged with equity perpetuals, adding a new kind of market to the mix.
USDtb, the other Ethena dollar
USDtb is a separate, conventional stablecoin: backed by dollar assets, mostly shares in BlackRock's BUIDL Treasury fund, and issued since October 2025 by Anchorage Digital Bank. It's one of the stablecoins USDe can hold when funding is poor. This page is about USDe.
What live mode shows
Live mode reads USDe's supply on Ethereum and 18 other chains from public nodes, plus TON through toncenter, and treats what remains locked on Ethereum as "other chains". It reads every Ethereum block's USDe transfers, which gives the transfer rate and every mint and burn, and polls Base for mints and burns. On other chains a change in supply appears as a net mint or burn, which is usually USDe moving between chains, not new USDe. From the sUSDe contract it reads the exchange rate, the USDe staked and the last reward payments. The backing figures are the published snapshot above, dated; they are not live.
What the animation simplifies
The backing is drawn as one vault; in reality it's custody accounts, exchange margin and stablecoin wallets. The hedge panel uses one round ETH price and ignores fees, basis and funding while the price moves. Rewards to sUSDe and the reserve fund are much smaller than the mint in the other steps, so they're shown as numbers, not as particles. Each chain is a small ring of wallets and step-by-step mode starts from an illustrative billion, split the way the real supply is. Read Ethena's documentation for the details.