According to data from DefiLlama, MakerDao (MKR) has emerged as the highest revenue-generating decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol in 2023. This significant turnaround is supported by the growth in DAI stablecoin supply and the integration of real-world assets and U.S. Treasury bills (T-bills), which have provided returns due to rising interest rates.
Despite being second in total value locked (TVL) after Lido Finance (LDO), Maker has outperformed Lido in terms of revenue this year, with total earnings of $103 million to date. Lido had initially overtaken Maker in TVL due to increased Ethereum (ETH) staking activity in anticipation of Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade.
Maker faced challenges in March when the DAI stablecoin experienced a drop following the unexpected collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the situation worsened when USD Coin (USDC) temporarily lost its parity with the dollar.
Before the aforementioned incident, MakerDAO’s Peg Stability Module (PSM) heavily relied on USDC to maintain DAI’s peg at $1. In January, PSM held $2.4 billion in USDC-backed DAI. However, USDC’s brief downturn in March impacted DAI, causing it to lose its dollar parity and reducing its supply, prompting Maker to decrease its reliance on the stablecoin. By June, this ratio had dropped by nearly 80%.
As the year progressed, Maker’s real-world assets (RWAs) expanded. These are on-chain variations of traditional financial tokens. Over 65% of Maker’s fee revenue by October came from RWAs. Yet, by the end of October, revenue from tokenized T-Bill products began to overshadow that from RWAs, constituting 52% of Maker’s revenue, while only 6.1% came from RWAs.