Challenge

Sky Protocol, formerly known as Maker, stands as one of DeFi’s most established protocols, with over $5 billion in TVL. Its flagship stablecoin, USDS (formerly DAI), ranks as the third-largest stablecoin by market capitalization. However, the protocol faced significant limitations being confined to a single blockchain:

• Restricted access to Solana’s rapidly growing DeFi ecosystem
• Liquidity fragmentation that would result from traditional bridging solutions creating wrapped tokens
• Limited flexibility for future multichain expansion as the protocol evolved
• Inability to leverage Solana’s enhanced performance capabilities and low transaction costs

As Sky underwent its transformation from Maker, expanding USDS’s reach beyond Ethereum became critical for accessing new user bases and liquidity pools while maintaining the protocol’s decentralized, non-custodial nature.

Solution

Sky Protocol selected Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers (NTT) standard to bring USDS natively to Solana. This integration leveraged NTT’s burn-and-mint deployment mode, enabling:

• Native USDS functionality on both Ethereum and Solana without wrapped tokens
• Unified token supply management across all supported chains
• Complete control over token contracts, metadata, and upgrade paths
• Built-in security features including rate-limiting and access controls
• Seamless foundation for future expansion to additional blockchain networks

The choice of NTT aligned with Sky’s requirements for institutional-grade security and flexibility, ensuring USDS maintained its properties and governance structure across chains while eliminating the risks associated with traditional bridging solutions.

Results

Since launching USDS on Solana with Wormhole NTT on November 19, 2024, the integration has achieved significant milestones that showcase successful multichain deployment and deep Solana ecosystem adoption:

• $824M in total value transferred between Ethereum and Solana
• 1,370 successful multichain transfers completed
• $5.1B in total DEX trading volume
• 9.3M completed trades
• $22.6M average daily trading volume

The Solana deployment has enabled robust ecosystem participation through major protocol integrations:

• Kamino Finance: 200,000 USDS weekly incentives for USDC/USDS liquidity providers and 100,000 USDS weekly for suppliers
• Drift Protocol: 100,000 USDS weekly for USDS suppliers
• Save Finance: 400,000 USDS monthly for USDS suppliers
• Jito: 5,000 USDS weekly for SOL/USDS liquidity pools

The expansion has established Sky as the first major DAO to bring one of the largest stablecoins natively to Solana, setting a new standard for institutional-grade multichain token deployments.