What is Dai (DAI)?

DAI’s main advantage lies in its soft peg to the price of the U.S. dollar.

The crypto market is notorious for its volatility with even the largest, highly-liquid coins such as Bitcoin sometimes experiencing price changes (both up and down) of 10% or more within a single day. Under these circumstances, traders and investors are naturally predisposed to add safe-haven assets to their portfolios, whose stable price might help offset significant market fluctuations.

One such kind of asset are stablecoins, of which DAI is one example. These are cryptocurrencies whose price is pegged to assets with a relatively stable value — most commonly traditional fiat currencies, such as USD or EUR.

Another key advantage of DAI is the fact that it is managed not by a private company, but rather by a decentralized autonomous organization via a software protocol. As a result, all instances of issuance and burning of tokens are managed and publicly recorded by Ethereum-powered self-enforcing smart-contracts, making the entire system more transparent and less prone to corruption.

In addition, the process of developing DAI software is governed in a more democratic way — via direct voting by the regular participants of the token’s ecosystem.

A decentralized digital economy needs stable money in order to function. $DAI is a price-stable asset that can be used as a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. $DAI enables a wide range of financial activities and applications that have previously been untenable due to the volatility of legacy cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. People can obtain $DAI by buying it from brokers or exchanges, or simply by receiving it as a means of payment. Once generated, bought, or received, $DAI can be used in the same manner as any other cryptocurrency: it can be sent to others, used as payments for goods and services, and even held as savings through a feature of the Maker Protocol called the Dai Savings Rate (DSR).