December has been a breakthrough month for MakerDAO, with data from the decentralized finance (DeFi) analytics platform DeFiLlama showing it set new records in fees and revenues.
According to the data, MakerDAO reached a peak of $40.86 million in fees, a key metric of user activity, and $26.77 million in revenue, reflecting retained earnings, between December 1 and December 31.
A Historic Month for MakerDAO
2024 has also been the crypto lending protocol’s best year since its inception, making about $304 million in fees and over $174 million in revenue. At that time, the highest amount recorded for fees was in April, when the protocol received $32.62 million, while its best month in terms of turnover was November when it made $18.91 million.
However, December’s numbers beat both those figures by $8.24 million and $7.86 million, respectively, setting a new precedent for the platform.
Interestingly, MakerDAO also saw its highest single-day performance on December 9, bringing in $1.67 million in levies and $1.18 million in income. These earnings have been driven primarily by interest payments on loans made on the protocol’s DAI stablecoin, reflecting the increasing demand for its lending services.
In August, the platform announced it would rebrand to Sky after two years of development aimed at adding new functionalities and improving user interactions. It also introduced two new cryptocurrencies: USDS, a stablecoin that users could convert from their existing DAI holdings, and a new governance token named SKY.
USDS has also been launched on Solana as a DeFi-native stablecoin. The network has the second-largest decentralized finance ecosystem after Ethereum, with about $8.5 billion locked into its DeFi projects.
MKR’s Market Performance
Elsewhere, Maker’s native asset MKR experienced a less-than-impressive December. According to data from CoinGecko, the token lost 16.8% of its value over the last 30 days, with its worst performance coming in the previous two weeks, where it dipped by more than 21%.
In the last 24 hours, its price fluctuated between $1,488 and $1,547, finally settling at $1,522. The current price is 1.1% below its previous level from yesterday and remains more than 75% below its all-time high, recorded in May 2021. However, it still shows healthy market activity, with its latest one-day trading volume of $113.1 million helping it maintain a significant value with a market cap of $1.37 billion.
