The Amazing Rise of Ethena-USDe and the Synergistic Effect of the Decentralized Finance 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, with a monthly growth rate exceeding 58%. This growth is mainly attributed to the bullish market sentiment following Bitcoin's price breakthrough to a new high, leading to an increase in funding rates, which in turn pushed up the staking yield of USDe. Although there has been a slight decline in the past few days, the annualized yield of USDe still remained around 25% high on November 26.

At the same time, MakerDAO has become an unexpected beneficiary in this wave of rise. Currently, Maker's daily income has increased by over 200% compared to a month ago, reaching an all-time high. This growth is closely related to the development of Ethena. On one hand, the high staking yield of USDe has stimulated the borrowing demand for sUSDe and PT assets, with the scale of borrowing DAI using these assets as collateral on the Morpho platform reaching 570 million USD, with a loan utilization rate exceeding 80% and an annualized deposit yield of 12%. In the past month, the incremental loans issued by Maker's D3M module through Morpho have exceeded 300 million USD. On the other hand, this borrowing demand has also indirectly increased the DAI utilization rate through other channels, for example, the DAI deposit rate on Sparkfi has reached 8.5%.

MakerDAO's balance sheet shows that the total amount of DAI loans issued to Morpho and Spark through the D3M module reached 2 billion USD, accounting for nearly 40% of its asset side. These two alone generated an annualized income of 203 million USD for Maker, equivalent to a daily contribution of 550,000 USD, accounting for 54% of the total annualized income.

In this rise cycle, Ethena, MakerDAO, and Morpho form the core, while peripheral protocols like AAVE, Curve, and Pendle also benefit to varying degrees. For instance, AAVE's DAI borrowing rate exceeds 50%, and the total USDS deposits are close to 400 million USD; USDe/ENA related trading pairs hold significant positions in terms of trading volume and liquidity on Curve and Pendle. Related tokens like Curve, CVX, ENA, and MKR have also achieved monthly increases of over 50%.

Whether this growth model can be sustained depends on whether the interest rate spread between USDe and DAI will exist in the long term. Influencing factors include the sustainability of market bull sentiment, improvements in the Ethena economic model, and increases in market share, as well as competition from interest-bearing stablecoin strategies launched by other platforms (such as HTX and a certain trading platform).

However, this rise has also raised concerns about the security of D3M. Although D3M will not directly cause DAI to become an under-collateralized stablecoin, it does increase some risks: it may cause DAI to become a "shadow stablecoin" again; various risks of Ethena may be transmitted to DAI; it may lower the overall collateralization ratio of DAI.

Overall, the rapid rise of USDe and the increased earnings of MakerDAO reflect the vitality and interdependence of the Decentralized Finance ecosystem. However, the sustainability of this growth pattern and potential risks still require close attention from market participants.