USDe and MakerDAO's Synergistic Rise: New Trends in the DeFi Market

Recently, the total issuance of USDe has shown a significant rise, climbing from 2.4 billion USD to 3.8 billion USD within a month, with a monthly increase of over 58%. This phenomenon is mainly due to the market's bullish sentiment following Bitcoin's new price highs, which has driven up the funding rates and subsequently increased the staking yield of USDe. Despite a recent pullback, the annualized yield of USDe remains at a high level of around 25%.

At the same time, MakerDAO has become a beneficiary of this round of rise. Its daily revenue has increased by over 200% compared to a month ago, setting a new historical high. This is closely related to the development of Ethena. The high staking yield of USDe has stimulated the 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, a borrowing utilization rate of over 80%, and an annualized deposit yield of 12%. In the past month, MakerDAO has issued over 300 million USD in new loans on the Morpho platform through the D3M module.

The balance sheet of MakerDAO 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 businesses alone generated an annualized revenue of 203 million USD for MakerDAO, equivalent to 550,000 USD per day, accounting for 54% of the total annualized revenue.

In this rise ecosystem, Ethena has become the core of the DeFi revival wave. The optimism brought by Bitcoin's new highs has pushed up funding rates, thereby affecting USDe staking yields. MakerDAO, with its complete capital flow chain and the "central bank attributes" of the D3M module, has become an important supporter of the USDe ecosystem. Morpho has played the role of a "lubricant" in this process. Other DeFi protocols such as AAVE, Curve, and Pendle have also benefited, with AAVE's DAI borrowing utilization rate exceeding 50% and total USDS deposits nearing 400 million USD.

The sustainability of this growth model mainly depends on whether the interest rate spread between USDe and DAI can exist in the long term. Influencing factors include the sustainability of bullish market sentiment, improvements in the Ethena economic model, the increase in market share, and competitive pressure from other platforms.

However, the widespread application of the D3M module has also raised some concerns. Although D3M will not directly cause DAI to become an under-collateralized stablecoin, it does increase certain risks: it may cause DAI to once again become a "shadow stablecoin"; the operational risks of Ethena may be transmitted to DAI; and it may also lower the overall collateralization rate of DAI.

Overall, the collaborative rise model of USDe and MakerDAO demonstrates a new trend in the Decentralized Finance market, but its long-term sustainability and potential risks still need further validation by the market.