Ethena has become the highest-earning decentralized application (DApp) after breaching $6.8 million in daily cumulative revenue over the past week, according to a March 8 X post by Seraphim Czecker, head of growth at Ethena Labs.
The only two blockchains that surpassed Ethena’s revenue were Tron, with $38.6 million, and Ethereum, with a $182.5 million daily cumulative revenue over the past seven days.
Ethena currently offers a 67.2% yield on its USDe synthetic dollar to over 350,000 users, according to its homepage. The market cap of Ethena’s USDe rose 43% over the past week and 409% over the past month, to $840 million, according to DefiLlama data.
Ethena Labs launched its USDe synthetic dollar on the public mainnet on Feb. 19. The launch caused widespread concern among investors, as the Ethereum-based synthetic dollar launched with a 27.6% annual percentage yield (APY), which was considerably higher than the 20% yield offered by Anchor Protocol on Terra’s UST before the algorithmic stablecoin issuer Terra collapsed in May 2022.
The initial concerns around USDe’s yield are a sign of a maturing industry, recovering from the collapse of the Terra Luna ecosystem, Guy Young, the founder of Ethena Labs, told Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview on Feb. 22.
“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.”
Unlike the failed Anchor protocol, USDe’s yield is publicly verifiable, as it is generated via staking returns and shorting Ether perpetual future contracts, Young told Cointelegraph.
Ethena Labs secured $14 million in funding for its synthetic dollar, the team disclosed on Feb. 16. The round was backed by venture capital firm Dragonfly. The startup raised $6 million in an earlier round of investment in 2023, headlined by Binance Labs, Gemini, Bybit, Mirana Ventures, OKX Ventures, and Deribit.
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