Funding-regime stress test
sUSDe APY = fairly stable staking yield on collateral + highly variable funding received on the short hedge. When funding turns negative, holder yield floors near zero while the reserve fund absorbs the bleed.
Funding regimes → your APY
Same deposit, same staking component — only the funding regime changes. This is why the advertised APY chart looks like a rollercoaster.
| Regime | Funding APR | Your APY | Earnings / yr | vs T-bill |
|---|
The risks a T-bill does not have
The excess yield over risk-free is payment for real risks: a 7-day unstaking cooldown (you cannot exit sUSDe instantly — during a stress event you wait while the situation develops), smart-contract and exchange-counterparty risk on the hedge legs, and tail depeg risk if a sustained negative-funding regime drains the reserve fund. If you use sUSDe as collateral anywhere, model what a depeg does to your loan health on the stablecoin depeg calculator. If you would rather run the basis trade yourself and keep the funding directly, compare on the cash-and-carry arbitrage calculator.
Why sUSDe yield needs a stress test, not a screenshot
Every sUSDe explainer quotes whatever the APY happens to be today — 9.4% on the 7-day trailing average as of spring 2026, over 20% during the 2024 bull run, near zero in the worst chop. Quoting a single number misses the structure: the yield is a sum of two very different streams. The staking component (a few percent on the collateral leg) is boring and dependable. The funding component — payments the protocol receives for being short perpetual futures against its collateral — is a direct bet on market regime. When longs crowd in, funding is rich and sUSDe looks unbeatable; when the market chops or bears, the funding stream evaporates, and with it most of the headline APY.
The scenario worth pricing is not the average — it is the stretch of bad regime. When funding goes negative, Ethena's short legs pay rather than receive; the reserve fund absorbs short windows and holder yield floors near zero rather than going negative. The math this calculator runs: if the headline regime pays 9.4% and a stress regime pays roughly your staking component minus negative funding (floored at zero), then with a 4.5% T-bill benchmark it takes only about 190 days per year of zero-yield regime for the blended return to fall below risk-free. Holding a novel synthetic dollar through a bad year to underperform a T-bill is the quiet failure mode — not the dramatic depeg everyone argues about.
The 7-day unstaking cooldown compounds this. You cannot exit sUSDe the moment a regime turns — you signal, wait a week fully exposed, then exit. That makes the decision forward-looking by construction: the useful question is not today's APY but what blended APY you expect across regimes you will actually sit through, priced against the boring alternative. That is the number this page computes.