DAI

Overview

DAI is a dollar-pegged stablecoin minted against collateral posted to the Sky Protocol, the system formerly governed as MakerDAO. Sky's own documentation calls DAI "the original decentralized stablecoin, launched in 2017" and states it is backed by overcollateralized crypto and real-world assets, with an immutable smart contract. Sky now markets USDS as the upgraded stablecoin and lets holders convert between DAI and USDS at a 1:1 ratio.

What stands behind it

DAI is issued against collateral held in vaults, so its backing is a portfolio of positions. There is no cash account at a custodian. Sky groups those positions into Sky Agent Vaults deploying capital into lending and yield strategies, PSM Vaults holding USDC reserves, Crypto Vaults holding ETH, WBTC and stETH posted by borrowers, and legacy RWA Vaults.

DIA's own registry data records DAI at about $4.78B circulating across Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and Gnosis.

Sources: Sky Ecosystem Insights, Sky documentation overview, Sky Ecosystem, USDS and sUSDS products page

Backing and reserves

What Sky publishes

Sky states that its stablecoins are strictly backed by a diversified portfolio of onchain and real-world assets, and points users to public dashboards to verify collateral in real time. Those dashboards are JavaScript-rendered and served no readable figures to an automated fetch, so no collateral total is quoted here.

Sky's documentation names the collateral categories but does not, on the pages that serve static content, publish a per-category dollar breakdown for DAI specifically. Sky presents collateral at the protocol level covering DAI and USDS together, so a reader cannot separate what backs DAI from what backs USDS using the public pages.

What is not published

No reserve attestation for DAI signed by an accounting firm was found. The disclosure that does exist for the real-world portion is issued per vault through the governance forum: the RWA Foundation/HVB vault, tagged rwa-009, published a Monthly Summary Cash Report for the period ending 31 July 2026. The forum post carries the figures inside an attached image and links PDF and Excel copies by IPFS content identifier, so the numbers are not machine-readable from the post itself.

The crypto collateral is auditable on chain. The off-chain collateral is disclosed through per-vault governance reporting. No single signed statement covers the whole book.

Sources: Sky Ecosystem Insights, collateral categories and vault types, Sky governance forum, RWA Foundation/HVB monthly reporting July 2026, Sky Ecosystem, USDS and sUSDS products page

Peg behaviour

The peg is defended by the Peg Stability Module. Sky describes PSMs as smart contracts that let users convert supported stablecoins directly with the protocol into USDS or DAI at a predictable rate, quoting 1:1 swaps of USDC and USDT with zero fees and no slippage.

That mechanism ties DAI's short-term peg to the stablecoins sitting in the PSM. A DAI holder redeeming through the PSM receives USDC, so DAI inherits the custody and issuer risk of the reserve stablecoin for that portion of the book.

Sources: Sky Ecosystem, Peg Stability Module description

Risks

Collateral concentration in another issuer's stablecoin

The PSM holds USDC reserves to make 1:1 swaps work. A failure or freeze at that issuer propagates into DAI's backing, and Sky does not publish a per-asset dollar breakdown on its static pages that would let a reader size the exposure.

Opaque real-world collateral

Sky lists structured credit, fixed income, energy financing, AI infrastructure and fintech lending among the collateral types behind its stablecoins. Those positions are not verifiable on chain. The reporting that exists arrives monthly, per vault, on a governance forum, and in the July 2026 RWA Foundation/HVB case the figures sit inside an image and IPFS attachments.

Governance risk

Collateral onboarding, debt ceilings and vault parameters are decided by SKY governance. None of it is fixed in the token contract. The DAI contract is immutable, the system around it is not.

Migration risk

Sky positions USDS as the upgrade and DAI as the legacy asset, with 1:1 conversion between them. Liquidity, integrations and incentives can move to USDS over time.

Sources: Sky Ecosystem Insights, collateral types and vault categories, Sky Ecosystem, Peg Stability Module and USDS positioning, Sky governance forum, RWA Foundation/HVB monthly reporting July 2026

What this map tracks

The Global Stablecoin Map classifies DAI as a crypto-backed, USD-pegged stablecoin issued by Sky, and reads its supply on six chains: Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base and Gnosis. Circulating value in the registry is about $4.78B. Market price and supply are DIA first-party data.

On Ethereum, the Dai contract reported a total supply of about 4.56B DAI on the Blockscout token API at the time of reading. Chain-level supply reads like this are what the map aggregates, for DAI and for every coin in the stablecoin explorer.

What is not read

The composition of Sky's collateral. Vault-level crypto collateral is on chain and observable in principle. The real-world positions are not, and the map does not verify the monthly vault reports Sky publishes on its governance forum. A supply figure is a claim about tokens outstanding. It is not a claim about what backs them.

Sources: Blockscout token API, DAI on Ethereum

Common questions