The rapid rise of Ethena-USDe and the chain reaction of the DeFi ecosystem

Recently, the total issuance of USDe has shown explosive growth, jumping from 2.4 billion USD to 3.8 billion USD within a month, with a monthly increase of over 58%. This rise is mainly driven by the market optimism following Bitcoin's new highs, which has pushed the funding rates up, thereby increasing the staking yield of USDe. Although there has been a recent pullback, the annualized yield of USDe remains at a quite respectable level.

This change has not only affected the Ethena ecosystem but also brought unexpected gains to MakerDAO. MakerDAO's daily income has risen by more than 200% compared to a month ago, reaching a historic high. This rise is closely related to the Ethena ecosystem. The high staking yield of USDe has stimulated borrowing demand for sUSDe and PT assets, with the scale of borrowing DAI collateralized by these assets on the Morpho platform reaching 570 million USD, and the borrowing utilization rate exceeding 80%.

MakerDAO has provided a total of approximately $2 billion in DAI loans to Morpho and Spark through its D3M module, accounting for nearly 40% of its asset side. These two businesses alone generated $203 million in annualized revenue for MakerDAO, equivalent to $550,000 per day, representing 54% of total annualized revenue.

This growth model has formed a virtuous cycle involving multiple Decentralized Finance protocols. The rise in Bitcoin prices has driven up the staking yields of USDe, while MakerDAO has become an important supporter of the USDe ecosystem through its well-developed capital flow chain and the "central bank attributes" of its D3M module. Morpho has played a key intermediary role in this process.

The sustainability of this growth model mainly depends on whether the interest rate spread between USDe and DAI can be maintained. Influencing factors include the continued bullish sentiment in the market, the optimization of Ethena's own economic model, and competitive pressure from other platforms, such as the recently launched interest-bearing stablecoin strategies by certain large exchanges.

Despite the concerns regarding the safety of DAI raised by the use of the D3M module, 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% collateralization ratio. Therefore, D3M does not directly cause DAI to become an under-collateralized stablecoin, but it does introduce some risks, such as the potential for DAI to become a "shadow stablecoin", introducing additional operational and contract risks, and possibly lowering the overall collateralization ratio of DAI.

Overall, the rapid rise of Ethena-USDe has not only driven the development of its own ecosystem but has also brought new vitality and opportunities to the entire Decentralized Finance field, while also provoking in-depth reflections on risk management and sustainability.