Ethena USDe at 65 Cents on Binance: What Happened and the Yield Risk
Why Ethena's USDe hit 65 cents on Binance in October 2025 while Curve held near $1, where its yield comes from, and a phone check for crypto dollar savers.
Key takeaways
- On October 10, 2025, USDe traded near 65 cents on Binance but dipped only about a third of 1% on Curve, its main market, according to data from investor Haseeb Qureshi.
- Binance priced collateral largely off its own order book, so some borrowers were liquidated at prices the wider market never saw. Binance later paid $283 million to users hit by drops in USDe, BNSOL and WBETH and by transfer delays.
- USDe was built to earn mainly from funding fees paid by leveraged traders plus Ether staking. Ethena's 2026 reports say yield now comes mostly from DeFi lending rates, so the source of a crypto dollar's yield can change over time.
- USDe's supply fell from a peak of about $15 billion in early October 2025 to about $4.9 billion by the end of September 2026.
- Before locking a crypto dollar for yield, check which coin you hold, whether the rate is variable, and who pays the rate and carries the risk.
Ethena’s USDe, a crypto dollar designed to hold $1, traded at about 65 cents on Binance on October 10, 2025. On Curve, its main market, it dipped only about a third of 1%. Binance priced users’ collateral largely off its own order book, so some borrowers were liquidated at prices the wider market never saw.
This matters to anyone earning yield on a crypto dollar. The coin itself mostly held its value, yet ordinary users still lost money because of how one exchange priced it. The Bullrunners video, presented by Rory, uses that night to ask three questions every yield saver should answer: who pays the extra return, who holds the coins, and who gets hurt first when something breaks.
What is Ethena’s USDe and how does it hold $1?
USDe is a synthetic dollar that was built out of a trade, not a pile of bank deposits. In its original design, Ethena holds real coins such as Bitcoin and Ether. At the same time, it takes an equal short bet against those coins on futures exchanges. A short is a bet that the price will fall.
The video gives a simple example. If Ether drops 10%, the coins lose 10% and the short gains 10%. The combined position stays worth about the same in dollars. That balance is what lets USDe target $1 without holding cash for every coin.
Where does the USDe yield come from?
USDe’s yield was designed to come mainly from leveraged traders paying to bet on rising prices, though Ethena says the mix has since changed. On perpetual futures, traders who borrow to go long pay a regular fee, called the funding rate, to whoever holds the other side. Under the original design, Ethena sits on that other side and collects it.
Ethena also earned staking rewards on the Ether it held. The video describes these as a bit like interest a network pays for helping run it. Holders who lock their USDe as staked USDe receive their share of the income.
The video treats this as its most important point: the payout was mostly traders paying to speculate. In a May 2024 clip from Coinbase’s channel shown in the video, Ethena founder Guy Young said the product does very well when markets are bullish and funding is high. He added that a bear market would not mean disaster.
That picture has shifted. Ethena’s May 2026 governance report says 89% of USDe’s backing was then held in cash, with only 9% in the futures trade. The report says yield came mostly from DeFi lending rates, with funding fees playing a secondary role.
For comparison, the video plays a podcast clip it says is from Unchained. In it, Young says a normal bank pays about 50 basis points on savings, or half a percent. The gap between half a percent and a crypto dollar’s rate is the extra return. The video argues that extra always comes from someone taking a risk. For more on who keeps the interest on regulated stablecoins, see Bullrunners’ explainer on the stablecoin interest ban and who earns the yield.
What happened to USDe on Binance on October 10, 2025?
USDe fell to about 65 cents on Binance on October 10, 2025. That day, a tariff post from President Trump set off a crash that wiped out about $19 billion of leveraged positions.
A couple of days later, crypto investor Haseeb Qureshi went through the data. His findings showed:
- On Curve, where most USDe changes hands, the price dipped only about a third of 1%.
- Binance had no direct line to Ethena. The traders who would normally buy cheap USDe and redeem it for dollars could not do that on Binance.
Binance valued people’s collateral using its own prices. The exchange later said its price indexes leaned too heavily on its own order books. According to the video, Binance sold users out as if their USDe were worth 80 cents or less. USDe also dipped briefly on Bybit, to roughly 92 to 95 cents, but the Binance drop was far deeper.
Binance later paid out $283 million. That figure covered users hit by the price drops in USDe, BNSOL and WBETH, plus losses from transfer delays. The video’s point is that USDe did its job on its main market, yet people who had borrowed against it on Binance were wiped out anyway.
Why did USDe shrink by about two-thirds?
USDe’s supply fell sharply after the October 2025 crash as holders withdrew. These figures trace the decline:
| Date | USDe size | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Early October 2025 | About $15 billion (peak) | Guy Young, cited in the video |
| October 8, 2025 | Third-largest crypto dollar, nearly 5% of the market | Data cited in the video |
| October to December 2025 | Fell from about $14.7 billion to $6.4 billion, a drop of about $8.3 billion | 10x Research |
| End of April 2026 | About $3.9 billion | Ethena governance report |
| End of September 2026 | About $4.9 billion | Ethena Q3 2026 report |
At the Avalanche Summit in September 2026, Guy Young said around $30 billion of minting and redemption had flowed through Ethena’s smart contracts over two to three years. He also said he would never present anything with a return as risk-free.
Young also claimed that not even one basis point of loss occurred on Ethena’s own products during three stress events. These were the Bybit hack in early 2025, the October 10, 2025 deleveraging, and the KelpDAO hack in April 2026. The video notes that this is his claim, but says it lines up with the Curve price data. Bullrunners has covered the KelpDAO bridge exploit and who pays when a bridge fails.
Why did staked USDe’s rate fall from talk of 35% to about 5%?
According to the video, the rate on staked USDe fell because fewer traders were paying to bet on rising prices. In early April 2024, the video says, posts were circulating about 35% returns on a dollar with “zero risk”. By October 15, 2026, a rate table cited in the video showed staked USDe at just under 5%.
In a clip the video plays, Guy Young said crypto interest rates had come down a lot from the prior year. He said that in every bear market, yields drift toward the level of SOFR and US Treasuries. By his own description, a quiet market means the crypto dollar pays roughly what government bonds pay.
Ethena has also been building beyond the original trade. It runs a separate dollar coin, USDtb, launched in December 2024. USDtb is backed by BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund. On September 25, 2026, Ethena expanded USDe’s strategy to equity perpetual futures, using Binance’s tokenized stocks as collateral, with Binance as its first partner.
What are the main risks for USDe holders?
The video lists four downsides for anyone holding or earning on USDe:
- The yield moves with the market. When fewer people borrow to bet on rising prices, funding falls and so does the payout. That happened as rates went from talk of 35% to about 5%. Ethena’s 2026 reports show it now leans more on lending rates than on funding.
- Outside firms hold the pieces. The coins sit with outside custodians and the short bets sit on exchanges. If one of them has a problem, Ethena is exposed. That is why Guy Young keeps citing the hacks.
- Exchange prices can break. As on Binance, a single exchange’s price can diverge from the main market. If you have borrowed against a crypto dollar there, you can be liquidated at a price that was not real.
- Holders can leave quickly. USDe shrank by about two-thirds once people got nervous, including further redemptions after the KelpDAO hack in April 2026.
The video is clear that none of this makes USDe a scam, and USDe held its dollar on its main market. But it is not a savings account, whatever an app’s earn screen makes it look like. The same thinking applies to lending XRP. See Bullrunners’ checklist of risks before you lend your XRP.
A phone check for crypto dollar yield
The video ends with a simple check readers can do on their phone:
- Open the app where your crypto dollars sit and find the earn or savings page.
- Check which coin your dollars are actually held in. The screen may simply say “dollars”.
- Check whether the rate is fixed or variable. A variable rate is a clue that it moves with the market.
- Read the small print on where the rate comes from.
- Open your banking app, find your savings rate and compare the two.
- If the crypto app pays more, ask who is paying that rate and who is on the hook if it stops. If the app cannot tell you, the video says, that is your answer.
What to watch next
Watch staked USDe’s rate against Treasury yields, since Ethena’s founder links the two in quiet markets. Track USDe’s total supply for signs of further withdrawals or a recovery. Read Ethena’s governance reports to see how the backing and the sources of yield change. If you borrow against any stablecoin on an exchange, check how that exchange prices your collateral. October 10, 2025 showed it may not use the main market’s price.
In the US, the GENIUS Act stablecoin law sets January 18, 2027 as the latest date it can take effect. Regulators missed the July 18, 2026 deadline Congress gave them to write the rules. How those rules treat yield-paying crypto dollars is worth following.
Frequently asked questions
Why did USDe drop to 65 cents on Binance?
During the October 10, 2025 crash, Binance priced collateral largely off its own order book. Traders on Binance could not swap USDe straight back to dollars with Ethena, so the price there broke while Curve, where most USDe trades, saw only a small dip.
Did USDe lose its dollar peg?
On its main market, Curve, USDe dipped only about a third of 1%, according to data from Haseeb Qureshi. It also fell briefly to roughly 92 to 95 cents on Bybit, but the drop to about 65 cents on Binance was far deeper than anywhere else.
Where does Ethena's USDe yield come from?
USDe was designed to earn funding fees from leveraged traders betting on rising prices, plus staking rewards on Ether, while holding coins and shorting the same amount on futures exchanges. Ethena's May 2026 report says most of the backing was then held in cash and yield came mostly from DeFi lending rates, with funding fees secondary.
What is staked USDe paying now?
The video says a rate table on October 15, 2026 showed staked USDe at just under 5%, down from claims of 35% circulating in April 2024. In a clip shown in the video, Ethena founder Guy Young said crypto rates tend to fall toward Treasury and SOFR levels in bear markets.
Did Binance compensate users hurt by the USDe price drop?
Yes. Binance paid out $283 million after the October 10, 2025 crash. The payout covered users hit by the price drops in USDe, BNSOL and WBETH, as well as losses from transfer delays.
Full video transcript
From the video's captions, lightly formatted. Captions can mishear names and numbers, so check figures against the article above.
Right, bull runners. On the night of the 10th of October 2025, a crypto dollar that's supposed to be worth exactly $1 showed up on Binance at 65 cents. People who had borrowed against it, and Binance's own system started selling them out of that price, while on the main market for the very same coin, it had barely moved. And the reason, which is mad when you hear it, is that Binance was pricing it off its own screen and nowhere else. So, US DE holders, this one's for you.
Binance priced your crypto dollar at 65 cents, while Curve held a dollar. And I'll show you what happened. And if you own Athena, that juicy dollar yield comes from traders betting on prices. So, check it first before you lock any more in. And attention, Athena holders.
The crypto dollar that pays you shrank from $15 billion, and here's why. And if you don't know me, I'm Rory. I've been trading crypto and forex since 2020. And it's given me a full-time income and the freedom to travel the world while I do it. Also, there's a link sitting first in the description.
Leave that one with me a little while, because for people whose crypto just sits there earning nothing, it's genuinely changed things. So, before we're done, I'll answer three things for you. Where that payout on your crypto dollar actually comes from, and who's carrying the risk when it goes wrong, and whether that rate in your app is worth what you think it is. So, hang on. What's this got to do with your savings?
Well, think about the money sitting in your bank. The bank lends it out, earns a decent return from it, and hands you back a sliver. And the boss of Athena, Guy Young, put a number on that sliver in the Unchained podcast in September.
The core piece here is actually the savings, uh, you know, rewards that you're actually generating on the balances that are sitting within the app versus the 50 basis points that you're getting within a normal bank.
50 basis points, which is just a fancy way of saying half a percent. And that's his figure for a normal bank, not mine. So, the pitch writes itself, doesn't it? Your bank gives you half [snorts] a percent, and this crypto dollar says it'll pay you a lot more. And that's exactly why I want you to know where the extra comes from, because extra money always comes from somewhere, and somebody's always on the hook for it.
And it's never the bank that's on the hook, is it? When things go properly wrong, it's always us. So, with a crypto dollar that pays you, I want to know three names before I put a penny in. Who's paying the extra? Who's holding the coins?
And who gets hurt first if it all goes sideways? Because the big players always know those three names, and most of us never ask. So, let me show you who they are in this one, and exactly where you and I fit into all of this. Like if you're bullish, let's run it.
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Aable runners, welcome back. So, USDE is Athena's crypto dollar, and it's built out of a trade. Athena holds real coins, things like Bitcoin and Ether, and [snorts] at the same time it takes out an equal bet against those same coins on future exchanges. So, if Ether drops 10%, the coins lose 10, the bet gains 10, and the dollar stays a dollar, which is the clever bit. And here's where your payout comes from.
In crypto, loads of people borrow to bet on prices going up. And on these futures, they pay a fee every 2 hours to whoever's on the other side. That fee's called the funding rate. Athena sits on the other side and collects it, plus the staking reward on the Ether it holds, which is a bit like interest a network pays for helping run it. If you lock your USDE up as staked USDE, that's where your share comes from.
So, the money's mostly traders paying to gamble on prices going up, and that matters more than anything else in this video. So, back to the 10th of October 2025, a tariff post from President Trump set off a crash that wiped out about $19 billion worth of borrowed bets. And on Binance, USDE fell to about 65 cents. But Haseeb Qureshi, a well-known crypto investor, went through the data a couple of days later. On Curve, where most USDE changes hands, it only dipped around a third of 1%.
But Binance had no direct line to Athena. The traders who'd normally fix the price couldn't swap it straight back into dollars with Athena on Binance. And Binance valued people's collateral off its own price list. So, it sold people out as if their dollars were worth 80 cents or less. And a couple days later, Binance paid out $283 million to the people it hit, which is good for them.
But the coin did its job on the main market, and ordinary people got wiped out anyway because of how one big exchange chose to price it. That's a big players versus your money in one line. And look, I get it. Your bank pays you next to nothing, inflation eats the rest, and then something promises a proper return on a dollar, so of course you're tempted. But you end up trusting a stack of companies you've never met, an exchange's price feed, futures traders, and a firm holding the coins.
And nobody tells you which one's holding the risk until the night it goes wrong. Am I telling you to buy Athena? No. There may be better opportunities for your situation. But if some of your crypto is just sat there earning nothing, that's worth fixing.
And it's the exact job that Altcoin Pro team takes on. They'll help you get the crypto you hold working with full self-custody, meaning the keys are yours and the coins live somewhere you control rather than with a firm that could flag them, freeze them, or dump them at a silly price in the middle of the night. Inside, there are members from all walks of life. Plenty of them protecting what they've built, Plus a weekly research call and a one-to-one coaching. So you're never on your own with it.
Here's the route. Click the first link in the description and watch the short video. Underneath it are buttons open up a short form. Fill that in, pick a time for your free 15-minute call, and a member of the team will sit down with you and look at what you're actually holding. If you're watching on your phone, tap more under this video and you'll find a link right at the top.
It's for anyone holding $50,000 or more in crypto that's just sitting there. And if you're well set up, they'll tell you that, too. My advice is to book it before the 18th of January because that's the latest date America's new stablecoin law, the Genius Act, can come into force and the people writing the rules missed the deadline Congress gave them back in July 2026. So the ground under crypto dollars in America is about to move and you want your own plan in place before it does. And to be fair to Guy Young, he's never called it risk-free himself.
Here he is at the Avalanche Summit in September 2026.
I'd never present anything that has some level of return as risk-free, but I think the one data point I think we can point towards in the last sort of 2 to 3 years is I think Athena sort of had around $30 billion of mint redeem flow to come through the smart contract peak data size of around $15 billion this time last year.
So 15 billion at the peak, right around the start of October 2025. And StableView had it as the third biggest crypto dollar on the 8th of October with nearly 5% of the whole market 2 days before that night on Binance, which is mad when you think about how fast it got there. So what happened to the 15 billion? Well, a lot of people took their money out. Forklog reported USDE's size had dropped by 8.3 billion dollars since October 2025.
And by the end of September 2026, The Block was putting it about 4.9 billion. So, 2/3 of it gone, roughly. But, Guy Young's point is that the thing itself held up. Here's what he said about the bad nights.
So, you had the bibe hack at the beginning of 2025, the deleveraging event on the 10th of October back end of 2025, and then the hack was KelpDAO in April of this year. And during any of those periods, you know, not even a basis point of loss ever occurred on the Athena's product.
Not a basis point of loss on Athena's own products, and that's his claim. But, it lines up with the Curve numbers. The catch is a bit outside Athena's products, the exchanges, the leverage, the price feeds, where real people lost real money. So, the two things sit side by side. Remember, the payout is mostly traders paying to gamble on prices going up, and Guy Young was honest about what that means in May 2024 on Coinbase's own channel.
Generally, like the Athena product does very well when the market conditions are like pretty bullish, and like funding's high, and and like the returns are attractive. Uh that doesn't mean that there's like a disaster if if sort of things turn around and we have like a bear market in front of us.
So, it does very well when everyone's bullish, which tells you the other half, doesn't it? When the punters stop borrowing to bet on prices going up, the payout shrinks. And people forget that very quickly. Back in early April 2024, there were posts going around talking about 35% on your dollar with zero risk downside. Zero risk, which is the most dangerous phrase in money, because there's just no such thing.
And by the 15th of October 2026, a rate table doing the rounds had staked USDE at just under 5%. And Guy Young explains why, which is fair play to him.
Crypto interest rates broadly have just come down massively from where they were last year, where we typically see the same thing every bear market, where yields get up to or just below where SOFR and Treasuries are actually sitting in the real world.
a quiet market, the crypto dollar pays you about what boring government bonds pay. And that's his own description. And to be fair, Athena's been building around that. It has its own separate dollar coin, USDTB, backed by BlackRock's tokenized treasury fund. And in September, it started running the same trade on futures for shares, with Binance as its first partner.
But notice who's at the table: BlackRock, Binance, the futures traders, the big money funds doing this exact trade for themselves. They all get paid first, and they understand the risks inside out. The person at the end of the chain earning 5% in an app usually doesn't. So, let me be straight about the downside. First, the payout depends on traders wanting to bet on prices going up.
And And when they don't, it falls. And it fell from talk of 35% to around five. Second, the coins sit with outside firms, and the bets sit on exchanges. So, if one of those has a problem, Athena's exposed to it, which is why Guy Young keeps listing the hacks. Third, the price on any one exchange can break, like it did on Binance.
And if you've borrowed against your crypto dollar there, you can be sold at at a price that wasn't real. And fourth, it shrank by about 2/3 once people got nervous. None of that means it's a scam. And on its own main market, it held its dollar. But it does mean it's not a savings account, whatever the app makes it looks like.
So, here's your phone check. Open the app where your crypto dollars sit, and find the earn or savings page. Look at three things: which coin your dollars are really held in, because the screen might just say dollars; whether the rate is fixed or variable, because if it says variable, that's your clue it moves with the market; and the small print on where the rate comes from. Then open your banking app, find your savings rate, and compare the two. And if the bigger numbers in the crypto app, ask yourself the one question this whole video's about: who's paying it and who's on the hook if it stops?
If the app can't tell you, that's your answer. There's no such thing as free yield. Your bank pays you half a percent because it keeps the rest. And a crypto dollar pays you more because somebody, somewhere, is taking a risk to earn it. The big players pick their risks with their eyes open.
All I want is for you to do the same. And getting set up properly is what Tom, one of our members, went looking for. He left us a review on Trustpilot saying he wanted structure, rather than one more signal group. His coach walked him through the wallets, then through setting up a hardware wallet, which is a little gadget that holds your keys offline, one step after another. They sorted everything out together, so he knows exactly what he's got and where each bit lives.
And he feels far surer deciding what goes in cold storage and what goes into DeFi than he did at the start. DeFi, by the way, is short for decentralized finance. Money stuff run by code, rather than by a bank. And cold storage just means keeping your coins offline, where it's much harder for a hacker or a platform to get at them. Now, that's Tom's story.
It's not a typical one, and I won't pretend you'll get the same. So, with 50 grand or more of your cryptos just sitting idle, start with the first link in the description and the calls cost you nothing. Drop it in the comments for me. What's the highest rate you've ever been offered on a crypto dollar? And did anyone tell you where it came from?
And look, none of this is financial advice, it's just my take after a lot of digging. Crypto carries risk and what's happened before is no guarantee of what comes next. So, stick with me, subscribe, and there's a new one every day. Thanks for watching, guys. Keep your head, stack with purpose, and I'll keep you posted.
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Ooh.
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Ooh. Ooh.
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Education and commentary only, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile and you can lose money. Do your own research and speak to a qualified advisor before making investment decisions. Figures and quotes are as reported in the video on October 24, 2026 and may have changed since.
