Dai DAI
Rank #22 by market cap
Last 7 days
0.00%What it actually costs to sell DAI
Selling $100,000 of DAI returned 0.0% less than the quoted price — Deep. Measured 2026-08-29 on Ethereum.
What Dai is
DAI is a dollar-pegged stablecoin created in 2017 by MakerDAO, and it works fundamentally differently from Tether or USDC. No company holds dollars in a bank for it. Instead, users lock crypto collateral into smart contracts and mint DAI against it, always depositing more value than they borrow.
If collateral falls too far in value, the position is automatically liquidated to keep the system solvent. The peg holds through these incentives plus interest-rate adjustments governed by MKR token holders.
The complication is what backs it now. Over time, a substantial share of DAI's collateral shifted into centralised assets — notably USDC and tokenised real-world debt — which means DAI has inherited much of the counterparty risk it was designed to avoid. A decentralised stablecoin heavily backed by a centralised one is a meaningfully weaker claim than the original design, and it is the most important thing to understand before treating DAI as censorship-resistant.
Where DAI lives
Always verify a contract address against the project's own site before sending anything. Addresses are shown as published by the data source, not as an endorsement — and identical-looking tokens on other chains are the most common way people lose money here.
Price change
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Dai data synced 9m ago from CoinGecko. Figures shown in USD. This page is market information, not financial advice — and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell DAI.