Ethena-USDe achieves explosive rise, Decentralized Finance ecosystem welcomes new momentum

Recently, Ethena's USDe stablecoin has shown an astonishing rise in speed. In the past month, the total issuance of USDe surged from 2.4 billion USD to 3.8 billion USD, with a monthly increase of over 58%. This growth is mainly attributed to the bullish market sentiment following Bitcoin's price hitting a new high, which has driven up the funding rates and subsequently enhanced the staking yields of USDe.

In response to the rapid rise of USDe, MakerDAO has also become an unexpected winner in this wave of DeFi recovery. Currently, Maker's daily revenue has increased by over 200% compared to a month ago, reaching a historic high. This rise is closely related to the development of the Ethena ecosystem. The high staking yield of USDe has brought significant borrowing demand for sUSDe and PT assets, with the total scale of borrowing DAI using sUSDe and PT as collateral on the Morpho platform reaching approximately 570 million USD, with a borrowing utilization rate exceeding 80% and an annualized deposit yield as high as 12%.

The total amount of DAI loans issued by MakerDAO through its D3M module to the Morpho and Spark platforms has approached 2 billion USD, accounting for nearly 40% of its asset side. These two channels alone have generated an annualized income of 203 million USD for MakerDAO, equivalent to a daily contribution of 550,000 USD, which accounts for 54% of MakerDAO's total annualized income.

Beyond the rise core constituted by Ethena, MakerDAO, and Morpho, other DeFi protocols such as AAVE, Curve, and Pendle are also benefiting to varying degrees from the rise of USDe. For example, the borrowing utilization rate of DAI on the AAVE platform exceeds 50%, and the total deposits of USDS are approaching 400 million USD. At the same time, the rankings of trading pairs related to USDe and ENA have also significantly improved on platforms like Curve and Pendle.

The sustainability of this growth model mainly depends on whether the interest rate spread between USDe and DAI can exist in the long term. Factors affecting this include the persistence of market bullish sentiment, whether Ethena can improve APY distribution efficiency through economic model optimization, and competitive pressure from other platforms.

Although MakerDAO's D3M module has played an important role in driving the rise of DAI, it has also sparked discussions about risks. From a balance sheet perspective, the DAI minted through D3M is actually collateralized by sDAI, ultimately converting into long and short synthetic asset positions with an LTV of over 110%. While this does not directly cause DAI to become an undercollateralized stablecoin, it does introduce some potential risks, such as making DAI a "shadow stablecoin" again and possibly lowering DAI's overall LTV ratio.

Overall, the rapid rise of Ethena-USDe has brought new vitality to the DeFi ecosystem, but at the same time, market participants need to closely monitor the potential risks involved to ensure the long-term healthy development of the entire ecosystem.