Ethena-USDe achieves rapid rise, MakerDAO becomes the biggest beneficiary.

Recently, the total issuance of USDe has shown a significant rise, increasing from 2.4 billion USD to 3.8 billion USD within a month, with a monthly increase of over 58%. This rise is mainly due to the bullish market sentiment following the new highs in Bitcoin prices, which has driven up the funding rates and in turn enhanced the staking yield of USDe. Although it has slightly retreated compared to earlier periods, as of November 26, the annualized yield of USDe still remains at a high level of around 25%.

At the same time, MakerDAO has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of this rise. Currently, Maker's daily income has increased by over 200% compared to a month ago, reaching an all-time high. This rise is closely related to the development of Ethena. The high staking yield of USDe has stimulated borrowing demand for sUSDe and PT assets, with a total borrowing amount of approximately 570 million USD using sUSDe and PT as collateral through the Morpho platform, and the borrowing utilization rate exceeding 80%, while the annualized deposit yield has reached 12%. In the past month, the total amount of new loans that Maker has added on the Morpho platform through the D3M module has exceeded 300 million USD.

In addition to direct impacts, the borrowing demand for sUSDe and PT has also indirectly driven up the DAI usage rate through other channels. For example, the deposit interest rate for DAI on a certain lending platform has reached 8.5%. According to Maker's balance sheet, the total amount of DAI loans issued to two major lending platforms through the D3M module has reached 2 billion USD, accounting for nearly 40% of Maker's asset side. These two businesses alone have generated an annualized revenue of 203 million USD for Maker, contributing 550,000 USD daily to MakerDAO, which accounts for 54% of its total annualized income.

The rise of Ethena has become the core driving force of the DeFi revival wave. The optimistic sentiment brought about by the new highs in Bitcoin prices has pushed up the funding rates, which in turn affects the staking yield of USDe. MakerDAO, with its complete and highly liquid funding links and the "central bank attributes" brought by the D3M module, has become an important support for the USDe ecosystem. A certain lending platform has played the role of a "lubricant" in this process. These three protocols together constitute the core engine of the rise.

At the same time, 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 close to 400 million USD. The trading pairs related to USDe and ENA hold the second, fourth, and fifth positions in Curve's trading volume rankings, while they occupy the first and fifth positions in Pendle's liquidity rankings. Multiple related tokens such as Curve, CVX, ENA, and MKR have all seen monthly rises exceeding 50%.

The sustainability of this growth model mainly depends on the maintenance of the interest margin between USDe and DAI. Influencing factors include the continuity of bull market sentiment, whether Ethena can improve APY distribution efficiency through economic model optimization and market share enhancement, and competition from similar products launched by other trading platforms.

Although the use 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 long and short synthetic asset positions with an LTV ratio exceeding 110%. Therefore, D3M does not directly cause DAI to become an under-collateralized stablecoin, but it does introduce some risks, such as DAI potentially becoming a "shadow stablecoin" again, operational risks from Ethena possibly transmitting to DAI, and a reduction in overall LTV.