DAI/USD price feed

Most dollars on-chain are liabilities of a company; DAI is the output of a protocol. It is minted when someone locks collateral into smart contracts, retired when they unwind, governed in public. It has worked that way since before most of today's stablecoins existed, which makes it the longest-serving decentralized dollar in the market plus a fixture in older DeFi credit books.

That construction is exactly why its market price is worth watching. A company-issued dollar leans on reserves plus redemption; DAI leans on collateral that is itself crypto, managed by parameters a community votes on. Whatever view someone holds of that trade-off, the market expresses its own view continuously, in the pools where DAI changes hands. This feed carries that view, refreshed at every computation.

None of this page argues for or against the design. It does something more useful: it shows what the market pays for a protocol-minted dollar today, with the composition behind the number open for inspection.

Where other major dollars sprawl across dozens of quote assets, DAI's composition has stayed readable: a short list of quote assets, led historically by the two big on-chain dollars, with an Ether leg at times pricing DAI against something that is not a dollar at all.

Curve built its reputation on exactly this kind of stable-to-stable market, with DAI at the center of that era, so it is fitting that Curve venues have anchored this book. Ethereum has been the composition's home ground, with satellites elsewhere picking up the rest.

Simplicity is worth something in a reference rate. Anyone auditing this feed can hold the whole composition in their head: which venues, which legs, which chains. Fewer moving parts means fewer places for a surprise to hide, a property the larger compositions buy back with breadth instead.

DAI's contract contains no blacklist function. There is no admin key that can freeze a balance, no list a treasury can end up on. That is a verifiable property of the deployed code, not a promise. It is also the reason a particular constituency holds DAI deliberately: protocols plus individuals who want a dollar whose custody rules are part of the code.

Those holders still run books. Collateral positions get marked, treasuries get reported, integrations need a number to settle against. A dollar chosen for its independence deserves a reference rate with the same character: computed from public pools, weighted by observed liquidity, with every input traceable to a public venue.

The market for that property is quieter than the giants next door; the book is smaller, the flow steadier. The feed states that plainly. A smaller market earns smaller absolute depth; the number on this page describes the market DAI actually has, not the one a larger asset would show.

DAI's ecosystem is in transition. The protocol behind it now operates as Sky, which introduced USDS as its successor dollar. Holders can move between the two; both circulate at scale today, with DAI still counting its supply in billions.

For a price feed the transition is a fact to observe rather than a forecast to make. DAI keeps its own composition on this page for as long as its markets keep trading; USDS has its own page in this catalog, priced from its own pools. If liquidity migrates over the coming years, the two compositions will record it from both sides.

That is also the plain answer to a question people ask often: what happened to DAI? Nothing sudden. It remains live, liquid plus priceable, sitting next to a successor rather than behind one. The rate above is the market's daily confirmation.