The Amazing Rise of Ethena-USDe and the Revival of the DeFi Ecosystem

Recently, the total issuance of USDe has shown a significant rise, jumping from 2.4 billion USD to 3.8 billion USD within a month, achieving a monthly growth rate of over 58%. This increase is mainly due to the optimistic market sentiment following Bitcoin's new highs, leading to a rise in funding rates, which in turn has increased the staking yield of USDe. Although there has been a slight pullback compared to earlier periods, the annualized yield of USDe still remains at a high level of around 25%.

At the same time, MakerDAO, as an important participant in the DeFi ecosystem, has benefited greatly from this rise trend. Its daily revenue has increased by over 200% compared to a month ago, setting a new historical high. This rise is closely related to the development of Ethena. The high staking yield of USDe has brought huge lending demand for sUSDe and PT assets, especially on the Morpho platform, where the scale of borrowing DAI using sUSDe and PT as collateral has reached approximately 570 million USD, with a borrowing utilization rate exceeding 80% and an annualized deposit yield of 12%.

MakerDAO has provided nearly 2 billion USD in DAI loans to Morpho and Spark through its D3M module, accounting for nearly 40% of its asset side. These two businesses have generated 203 million USD in annual revenue for MakerDAO, equivalent to 550,000 USD per day, which represents 54% of its total annual revenue.

In this wave of DeFi revival, Ethena has become a core driving force. The optimism brought by Bitcoin's new high has pushed up the funding rates, thereby affecting the staking yield of USDe. MakerDAO, with its complete capital flow chain and the "central bank attributes" of the D3M module, has become an important support for the USDe ecosystem. Morpho has played a key intermediary role in this process. Other DeFi protocols like AAVE, Curve, and Pendle have also benefited from the rise of USDe to varying degrees.

The sustainability of this growth model mainly depends on the maintenance of the interest rate spread between USDe and DAI. Influencing factors include the persistence of bullish market sentiment, improvements in the Ethena economic model, the expansion of market share, and competition from similar products launched by other trading platforms.

Although the operation of the D3M module has raised some concerns about the safety of DAI, from a balance sheet perspective, the DAI minted by D3M is actually collateralized by sDAI, ultimately converting into a long and short synthetic asset position with over 110% LTV. This means that DAI does not directly evolve into an under-collateralized stablecoin.

However, the widespread use of the D3M module does bring some potential risks, including DAI possibly becoming a "shadow stablecoin" again, operational risks of Ethena potentially transmitting to DAI, and a decrease in overall LTV. These factors require close attention and management from ecosystem participants.