According to Seraphim Czecker, director of growth at Ethena Labs, Ethena has surpassed $6.8 million in daily cumulative revenue over the past week, becoming the highest-earning decentralized application (DApp).
Tron and Ethereum were the sole blockchains to have generated funds exceeding Ethena’s—$38.6 million and $182.5 million daily cumulatively over the preceding seven days, respectively.
At this time, Ethena claims to provide more than 350,000 consumers with a USDe synthetic dollar yield of 67.2%, as stated on its homepage. According to DefiLlama data, the market capitalization of Ethena’s USDe increased by 409% month-over-month and 43% week-over-week to $840 million.
On February 19, Ethena Labs introduced the USDe synthetic dollar to the public mainnet. The Ethereum-based synthetic dollar debuted with an annual percentage yield (APY) of 27.6%, which was significantly more than the 20% yield provided by Anchor Protocol on Terra’s UST before the algorithmic stablecoin issuer Terra’s May 2022 collapse. This development elicited widespread investor apprehension.
Early apprehensions regarding the yield of USDe indicate an industry maturing and recuperating from the Terra Luna ecosystem’s collapse, Guy Young, the founder of Ethena Labs, told Cointelegraph on February 22 in an exclusive interview.
“The immediate reference to Terra-Luna was just a knee-jerk reaction which people had to the yield itself… It’s right that people responded in the way that they have because we should be responding with skepticism and trying to work out whether [protocols] are fragile in the beginning rather than letting them get too big if they are.”
Young told Cointelegraph that, unlike the unsuccessful Anchor protocol, USDe’s yield is publicly verifiable because it is generated by pledging returns and shorting Ether’s perpetual future contracts.
Ethena Lab’s Funding
The team announced on February 16 that Ethena Labs had obtained $14 million in funding for its synthetic dollar. In support of the round was the venture capital firm Dragonfly. Binance Labs, Gemini, Bybit, Mirana Ventures, OKX Ventures, and Deribit led an earlier round of investment in 2023 in which the startup secured $6 million.
