REZ

The Basis Trade Belongs Onchain Every basis trade has two legs: the asset you hold and the short that hedges it. This piece is about the second, because where the short sits decides what you can verify and who you have to trust. We think it belongs onchain, and the market is already moving that way. The trade is one of the oldest in crypto. You buy an asset, short the same amount in perps, and collect the funding that leveraged longs pay. Price moves mostly cancel out, so your return comes from funding. Ethena did more than anyone to take this trade mainstream. Its design holds the spot with custodians and puts the short on centralized exchanges, which made sense when almost all deep perp liquidity was offchain. A growing share of that liquidity now trades onchain. Renzo Basis is built to let anyone participate in the growth of onchain basis. How the trade runs today Ethena's backing sits with off-exchange settlement providers such as Copper and Fireblocks and is delegated to exchanges as margin, but it's never deposited on them. The shorts run on centralized exchanges including Binance, Bybit, Bitget, Deribit and OKX, and holders own USDe or sUSDe while the positions sit with the protocol. It's a careful design that has held up under real stress, but the half of the trade earning the yield sits in exchange ledgers outsiders can't inspect. Ethena publishes a positions dashboard and monthly custodian attestations, more than most offchain products offer, and its docs say it is "actively exploring tools" that would let users "independently verify the existence of hedging derivatives positions." That's a lot easier when the positions are onchain, where anyone can look them up at any hour along with margin, funding payments and liquidations. Exchange risk Off-exchange settlement is a big improvement over leaving collateral on an exchange, but some exposure remains. Ethena's docs put it at "the outstanding PnL" between settlement cycles, which typically roll every four hours (daily for Copper's ClearLoop). If an exchange fails, its shorts go with it and that part of the hedge has to be rebuilt elsewhere. With an onchain hedge, PnL and hourly funding land in the account as they happen, and the margin and liquidation rules are published in advance. The October 10, 2025 crash hit both kinds of venue. USDe's backing held and redemptions stayed open, but on Binance's spot market USDe briefly traded near $0.65 while staying close to $1 on Curve. Binance's margin systems marked collateral at that price and liquidated users, and Binance later paid about $283M to those affected and changed its pricing. On Hyperliquid, auto-deleveraging closed profitable shorts to cover bankrupt longs, and those shorts are exactly what a basis trade uses as its hedge. Hyperliquid had published its deleveraging rules in advance, though, and every closed position can still be looked up. What changes onchain With both legs on an onchain venue, the spot and the short sit side by side in an account you control, with no redemption queue between you and your funds. The spot can back the short directly. On Hyperliquid, portfolio margin lets eligible accounts borrow USDC against BTC and HYPE when the short needs margin. Software can run the strategy through a trading key the owner grants and can revoke, whether that owner is a person or an institution. The funding can even be managed separately, since Pendle Boros lets you lock it in or trade it, much like an interest rate swap. Why this keeps moving onchain Perp liquidity has been moving onchain for a while. CoinGecko measured the perp DEX:CEX volume ratio rising from 3% in January 2025 to 13% by late 2025, and CryptoRank puts Q3 2026 at $1.71T on perp DEXs against $13T on centralized futures venues, with Hyperliquid alone at $621B. In the week of July 13, 2026, real-world asset perps made up 52% of Hyperliquid's volume, the first week any category passed half. Much of the new spot supply comes from exchanges themselves. Kraken's xStocks trade as spot on Hyperliquid next to perps on the same names, and on Robinhood Chain, Lighter runs perps next to Stock Tokens and accepts them as collateral. Ethena sees the same opportunity and expects equity perps to eventually outgrow crypto perps by a wide margin. In September it expanded on Binance, pairing bStocks with Binance equity perps. When the spot is onchain and the hedge sits on an exchange, every rebalance has to move between a custodian and an exchange. With both legs on one venue, they share an account and a margin system, and we expect more of the basis trade, in equities and in crypto, to run that way. Where Renzo Basis fits Renzo Basis runs the basis trade on onchain venues (currently Hyperliquid and Lighter) inside your own account, with funding settling every hour. Renzo's software manages it through a trading key; on Hyperliquid that's a trade-only agent key, which can trade but can't withdraw. Three guards watch the hedge, the funding and the margin. These protections reduce risk. They do not remove it. There's no lockup, and you can close whenever you want. You can try it at app.renzofinance.com.(Historical earnings: For 2026Q1 (period ended 2026-03-31), Robinhood reported basic EPS of 0.39, diluted EPS of 0.38, net income of USD 0.350 billion, and revenue of USD 1.067 billion, compared with basic EPS of 0.38, diluted EPS of 0.37, net income of USD 0.336 billion, and revenue of USD 0.927 billion in the prior-year period. For full-year 2025 (period ended 2025-12-31), basic EPS was 2.12, diluted EPS was 2.05, net income was USD 1.883 billion, and revenue was USD 4.473 billion. Consensus expectations: Consensus for 2026Q3 (event date 2026-10-27) expects EPS of 0.5427 and revenue of USD 1.415 billion.)