Author: Martin Young, CoinTelegraph; Translated by: Wuzhu, Golden Finance
Decentralized finance lending protocol Sky, formerly known as Maker, has deployed its USDS stablecoin on Solana in a push into blockchain’s growing decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.
Sky said in a Nov. 19 post that its USDS is “Solana’s first major DeFi native stablecoin” and will allow new ways to lend, borrow, and trade on Solana’s “top DeFi platform.”
“Today’s launch marks the first step in Sky’s strategy to increase DeFi liquidity and [total value locked] on Solana,” it added. In the future, pending governance approval, Sky said it will launch the SkyLink cross-chain bridge for USDS and sUSDS, the “savings” version of the stablecoin.
USDS is a rebrand of the stablecoin Dai (DAI), which aims to maintain a value of $1. Sky also rebranded from Maker in August, and confusion over the change led co-founder Rune Christensen to suggest reverting to the original name, but Sky stayed.
To get Solana users to use the redenominated token, Sky is offering rewards to early adopters and stablecoin liquidity providers on various DeFi protocols.
Kamino Finance users will receive $200,000 in weekly rewards for USDC/USDS liquidity providers and $100,000 in weekly rewards for stablecoin suppliers.
At the same time, Drift Protocol stablecoin suppliers will also receive a 100,000 USDS reward. Those who provide USD-pegged assets to Save Finance will have the opportunity to receive $400,000 in monthly rewards.
The Sky team added that the protocol has native integration via Wormhole’s Native Token Transfer (NTT), “enabling seamless USDS operations on Solana.”
USDS is the third largest stablecoin by market cap with $5.3 billion and holds 2.8% market share in a market dominated by Tether and USD Coin, which together hold 88% of the market share.
According to DefiLlama, DeFi on Solana has seen significant growth this year, with total value locked increasing by 487% year-to-date to $8.34 billion. However, Solana's popularity is primarily driven by memecoin speculation, as they are fast and cheap to create on the network using launchers like Pump.fun.
Solana DeFi growth year-to-date. Source: Deflama
Former governance token Maker has lost 30% since the rebrand, when the protocol urged holders to switch to the new token Sky (SKY).
Adoption has been slow as the new SKY governance token is not yet listed for trading on exchanges.
