Sky (MakerDAO) fees and revenue hit new highs

December was a breakout month for MakerDAO, with data from decentralized finance (DeFi) analytics platform DeFiLlama showing it set new records for fees and revenue.

According to the data, MakerDAO reached a peak of $40.86 million in fees, a key indicator of user activity, and $26.77 million in revenue, which reflects retained earnings, from Dec. 1 to Dec. 31.

A historic month for MakerDAO

2024 was also the best year for the cryptocurrency lending protocol since its inception, with approximately $304 million in fees and more than $174 million in revenue. At the time, the highest amount recorded in fees was April, when Protocol received $32.62 million, and its highest month in revenue was November, at $18.91 million.

However, December’s numbers exceeded those numbers by $8.24 million and $7.86 million, respectively, setting a new precedent for the platform.

Interestingly, MakerDAO had its best single-day performance on December 9th with $1.67 million in levies and $1.18 million in revenue. These revenues are primarily driven by interest payments on loans made on the protocol’s DAI stablecoin, reflecting increased demand for lending services.

In August, the platform announced it would be rebranding as Sky after two years of development aimed at adding new features and improving user interactions. It also introduced two new cryptocurrencies: USDS, a stablecoin that users can convert from their existing DAI holdings, and a new governance token named SKY.

USDS was also launched in Solana as a DeFi-native stablecoin. The network has the second-largest decentralized finance ecosystem after Ethereum, with approximately $8.5 billion locked in its DeFi projects.

MKR market performance

Elsewhere, Maker’s native asset MKR experienced a less impressive December. According to data from CoinGecko, the token has lost 16.8% of its value in the past 30 days, marking its worst performance in the past two weeks, dropping more than 21%.

In the past 24 hours, the price fluctuated between $1,488 and $1,547 before finally settling at $1,522. The current price is 1.1% below the previous level compared to yesterday and is still more than 75% below the all-time high set in May 2021. However, it still shows healthy market activity, with the latest daily trading volume at $113.1 million. This allowed the market capitalization to maintain a significant value of $1.37 billion.