Precio, gráfico y análisis de Dai (DAI)

Dai launched in 2017 as an attempt to build a dollar-denominated token that no company issues and no company can freeze. It is the longest-running stablecoin of that kind, and its history is the best available evidence for how the design behaves under stress.

How it works

Dai is created when a user locks collateral in a smart contract and borrows against it. The position must stay over-collateralised — worth more than the Dai it has issued — and if it falls below the required ratio, the collateral is auctioned to repay the debt. Repaying Dai releases the collateral and destroys the tokens. Interest rates on borrowing and on savings are set by holders of the governance token, and those rates are the main lever for pushing the price back toward a dollar when it drifts.

Supply

Supply is uncapped and endogenous: it is simply the total borrowed against collateral at any moment, so it expands when demand for leverage rises and contracts when positions are closed. There is no issuer deciding how much should exist.

What to watch

The composition of the collateral is the substance. Dai began backed by ether, but over time a large share came to be backed by other stablecoins — chiefly USDC — and by tokenised real-world debt. That improves stability and quietly reintroduces exactly the centralised dependency Dai was created to avoid: when USDC briefly lost its peg in March 2023, Dai followed it down. Watch the collateral mix, not the marketing.

Where it is used

Dai is widely used across DeFi as collateral, as a trading pair and as a savings instrument through its rate-bearing version. It is the default choice for people who want dollar exposure without holding a company’s liability.

The risks are real and specific. Over-collateralisation means a sharp fall in collateral value triggers liquidations, and in March 2020 a market crash combined with network congestion caused auctions to clear at near zero, leaving the system undercollateralised and requiring a recapitalisation. Governance is itself an attack surface. And the decentralisation claim now comes with a large asterisk, given how much of the backing is assets that a third party can freeze.