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Head-to-head · Stablecoins

DAI vs USDe DAI leads by 3 points.

DAI scores 3 points above USDe, led by counterparty and insolvency rank and redemption right exercised. DAI ranks #5 and USDe #9 of 11 published stablecoins. Every term of the gap is on the ledger below; the inputs are on the audit receipt.

DAI58
USDe55
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #5 and #9 of 11
Methodology v2026.10.18Ranking snapshot Evidence verified through 4 published criteria5 score dimensions Receipt #cc-VS-DAI-VS-USDE-ad6363f2
Published verdictRanking snapshot 3 November 2026

DAI leads by 3 points

DAI scores 3 points above USDe, led by counterparty and insolvency rank and redemption right exercised.

DAI #5 of 1158
USDe #9 of 1155
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99; a bar is empty at 41 and full at 99.
Why, term by termDAI leads on 2 of 4 published criteria; USDe on 2. The terms sum to the gap.
TermDAIUSDeWeightPoints
Counterparty and insolvency rank2/101/107.2+1.9for DAI+1.0 of 32
Redemption right exercised4/101/106.7+5.2for DAI+2.7 of 32
Reserve and assurance scope2/103/105.8−1.5for USDe−0.8 of 32
Seizure and upgrade authority5/107/104.3−2.2for USDe−1.2 of 32
Net of the terms+3.4
Reproduced gap+3.4
Published gapAfter score rounding and bounds — see the note below5855+3.0

Weight is in points of the 86-point weighted total. Points are score points of the gap between the two.

Quick facts

At a glance

2 of 3 rows read the same for both.
FactDAIUSDe
PricingSnapshotMINT/REDEEM FEE — official Sky Protocol documentation, https://developers.skyeco.com/protocol/liquidity/litepsm/ (fetched 29 September 2026), under “LitePSM-DAI-USDC @ Ethereum” > Details: “Fees have not been activated for DAI → USDC and USDC → DAI.” and “Fees could change in the future.” CORROBORATED ON-CHAIN 2026-09-29: MCD_LITE_PSM_USDC_A (0xf6e72Db5454dd049d0788e411b06CfAF16853042) returned tin() = 0 and tout() = 0 at Ethereum block 26,080,880 — no fee in either direction. MINIMUM: none is imposed by the contract (verified source: the fee is applied only inside “if (tout_ > 0) {” and no require() bounds the amount). CAPACITY: the pocket 0x37305B1cD40574E4C5Ce33f8e8306Be057fD7341 held 4,128,078,640.19 USDC against a DAI totalSupply of 4,601,170,733.74 at that block, with the pocket’s USDC allowance to the PSM effectively unlimited. THE PAGE THAT IS SILENT: the only binding agreement, the Skybase International Terms of Use (docs.sky.money/legal/skybase-international/terms-of-use, “Version: 2.0 | Last Modified: 1 September 2026”, fetched 29 September 2026), contains 0 occurrences of “DAI”, “redeem” and “redemption”; it prices nothing because it promises nothing. Gas is the only unavoidable cost and is paid to Ethereum, not to any issuer. TYPED RATE (label, not a quote): spreadPct = 0 — the LitePSM DAI → USDC swap at par with tin = tout = 0.ISSUER FEES: NIL, STATED. USDe Terms and Conditions (https://docs.ethena.fi/resources/usde-terms-and-conditions.md, "Last Updated: August 2025", fetched 29 September 2026), section 12 "Fees; Authorization": "Except as disclosed to you prior to completing a transaction as a Mint User, Ethena BVI will not charge you any fees for tokenizing assets for USDe, or receiving USDe. Any cost of executing a mint or redemption transaction is a cost reimbursement to cover friction such as blockchain gas fees or execution fees paid by Ethena BVI." USDe Mint User Agreement (https://docs.ethena.fi/resources/usde-mint-user-agreement.md, "Last Updated: August 2025", fetched 29 September 2026), section 9 "Fees": "The Company may charge fees in connection with the Services, which will typically not represent fees for the Company’s own account and will constitute reimbursements for costs associated with transactions initiated by you, such as blockchain gas fees and execution fees." and "The applicable Digital Currency network may charge a fee in connection with blockchain transactions. You are responsible for all such fees." MINIMUMS: THE PAGES ARE SILENT. Neither binding document publishes a mint or redemption minimum; re-searched 29 September 2026, "minimum" still appears exactly once in each document, in both cases as severability boilerplate. What replaces a published minimum is a published discretion, Mint User Agreement section 12 "Transaction Limits": "The Company reserves the right to change the mint, redemption, transfer, and velocity limits as we deem necessary." and "We may establish individual or aggregate transaction limits on the size or number of mints, redemptions, transfers or other transactions that you initiate using your status as a Mint User during any specified time period." Unlike Tether, which publishes a 100,000 USD floor and a redemption fee a reader can price, Ethena publishes no number at all — access is gated by whitelisting, not by a posted ticket size. CONVERSION RATE ON THE WAY IN, Terms section 13 "Currency Conversion": "All tokenizations of assets will be credited in USDe to your whitelisted wallet(s) based on a rate of one (1) USDe per 1 USD ($1) of notional value", with that value set as follows: "Such value shall be calculated by Ethena BVI based on the asset in its sole discretion". NOTE FOR THE CARD: a zero issuer fee is not a cheap product here — it is a fee schedule for a counterparty class the retail reader cannot join (Terms section 2: "If you are a Holding User, you do not have a right to redeem USDe with Ethena BVI."). The retail cost of entry and exit is the market spread, which this spec grades at zero.
Asset coverageEditorial——
Region fitSnapshotglobalglobal
From the published criteria

Which should you pick?

DAI

58#5 of 11
Leads
Pick it when
Pick DAI if counterparty and insolvency rank matters most — it scores 2/10 to USDe's 1/10 there (weight 30).
Strength
Seizure and upgrade authority — 5/10
Tradeoff
The thing that makes DAI feel dollar-redeemable — an instant, zero-fee, no-KYC, no-minimum 1:1 swap into USDC that works at billion-dollar size today — is a mutable governance parameter, not a promise, and it can be revoked faster than governance can normally act. This is now quoted from the source rather than inferred: DssLitePsmMom (0x467b32b0407Ad764f56304420Cddaa563bDab425, verified source, Sourcify exact_match) carries a section banner reading "Governance actions without delay" directly above "function halt(address psm, Flow what) external auth {". A second model run confirmed the mom is armed: PSM.wards(0x467b...b425) = 1 at block 25,789,445. The PSM's own source states "Setting `tin` or `tout` to `HALTED` effectively disables selling and buying gems respectively.", HALTED is "uint256 public constant HALTED = type(uint256).max;", and buyGem opens with "require(tout_ != HALTED, "DssLitePsm/buy-gem-halted");" — so the exit closes the same block it is decided, bypassing the 48-hour governance delay (MCD_PAUSE.delay() = 172800 seconds, re-read on-chain), while Sky's own documentation says only "Fees could change in the future." The chainlog also publishes a purpose-built emergency spell factory for this action, EMSP_LITE_PSM_HALT_FAB (0xB261b73698F6dBC03cB1E998A3176bdD81C3514A). Compounding it: the exit does not deliver dollars, it delivers USDC — "gem.transferFrom(pocket, usr, gemAmt);" — another issuer's token whose own retail redemption is gated, and the 4.13B USDC funding it sits at a single address Circle can blacklist (USDC.isBlacklisted(pocket) resolves and returned false at block 25,789,445 — the power is live, merely unused). And the holder has no unilateral fallback: the Emergency Shutdown Module that historically converted DAI into a direct pro-rata claim on collateral is disarmed — developers.skyeco.com/archive/shutdown/emergency-shutdown/ carries "The Emergency Shutdown Module ESM is currently deprecated" and MCD_ESM.min() returns 2^256-1 against a fire() guarded by "require(Sum >= min, "ESM/min-not-reached");", with ESM.Sum() standing at 0.0013058682050532. Sum can never reach min, so it can never be fired. Only Sky governance can now cage the system.

USDe

55#9 of 11
Pick it when
Pick USDe if reserve and assurance scope matters most — it scores 3/10 to DAI's 2/10 there (weight 24).
Strength
Seizure and upgrade authority — 7/10
Tradeoff
That you are not the customer. USDe Terms and Conditions, opening paragraph (https://docs.ethena.fi/resources/usde-terms-and-conditions.md, read 2026-08-19 (verification pass)): "For the avoidance of doubt, Holding Users are not customers of Ethena BVI." and section 2: "If you are a Holding User, you do not have a right to redeem USDe with Ethena BVI." Unless you are KYC-whitelisted as a Mint User — a status Ethena's docs describe as "subject to clearing KYC/KYB checks exclusively for approved market making counterparties" (https://docs.ethena.fi/overview/ethena-overview, read 2026-08-19 (verification pass)), and which US residents are barred from by Mint User Agreement section 1 ("Users in the United States are not eligible to become a Mint User.") — your only exit is selling to someone else at whatever the market pays. Compounding it, the redemption a Mint User does get is in kind and pro rata, "Ethena BVI (or an affiliate designated by Ethena BVI) commits to redeem 1 USDe for the notional value relating to its pro rata portion of the USDe Reserves in supported digital assets, up to a maximum amount of 1 USD in notional value, subject to these Terms, applicable law, and any fees where applicable." — a cap, not a floor — and section 11 confirms the reserves "Ethena BVI does not guarantee that the value of one (1) USDe will always or ever equal 1 USD ($1) on any platform. Due to a variety of factors, the value of USDe on third-party platforms such as cryptocurrency exchange platforms could fluctuate above or below 1 USD ($1), and the risk factors highlighted at docs.ethena.fi (as well as presently unknown risk factors) may result in the USDe Reserves falling to less than 1 USD ($1) of notional value per USDe in circulation." None of this is reachable from the product site: as served on 2026-08-19, https://ethena.fi/ contains the word "terms" nowhere in its delivered payload, while its footer strings "Careers" and "Brand Kit" do appear, proving the footer ships and the contract link does not.
Self-identify in 10 seconds

Which one is actually for you?

DAILeads

Choose DAI if counterparty and insolvency rank matters most

  • Counterparty and insolvency rank: 2/10 against 1/10 for USDe (weight 30)
  • Redemption right exercised: 4/10 against 1/10 for USDe (weight 28)
USDe

Choose USDe if reserve and assurance scope matters most

  • Reserve and assurance scope: 3/10 against 2/10 for DAI (weight 24)
  • Seizure and upgrade authority: 7/10 against 5/10 for DAI (weight 18)
Criterion by criterion

Scorecard

Published criteria · weight in points of 868 of 8 cells scored. Strength is read from the evidence file; the weight is the published one. Methodology

Counterparty and insolvency rank

by 1 of 10weight 7.2 of 86DAI leads
DAI2 out of 10
USDe1 out of 10

Redemption right exercised

by 3 of 10weight 6.7 of 86DAI leads
DAI4 out of 10
USDe1 out of 10

Reserve and assurance scope

by 1 of 10weight 5.8 of 86USDe leads
DAI2 out of 10
USDe3 out of 10

Seizure and upgrade authority

by 2 of 10weight 4.3 of 86USDe leads
DAI5 out of 10
USDe7 out of 10

Score dimensions

weights sum to 86

The published score is five dimensions, each weighted for the category. "Published criteria" is the criteria block above; the other four are the engine's own terms — availability, friction, trust record, measured data. Each bar is one side's points out of that dimension's maximum; the weight beside the name is its points of the 86-point weighted total. The published criteria above can fill 24 of the block’s 30. A weight marked “constant here” belongs to a dimension every ranked product in the category holds at the same value: it still counts in the total, and it orders nothing here.

Availabilityweight 20 of 86 · constant here
DAI14/20USDe14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
DAI7.4/30USDe6.1/30
DAI leads
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
DAI2.7/10USDe2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
DAI3.2/8USDe3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
DAI8.3/18USDe8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order

Choose DAI unless the term USDe leads on is the one you are buying.

Pick USDe if reserve and assurance scope matters most — it scores 3/10 to DAI's 2/10 there (weight 24).

The published order weighs every criterion the same way for everyone. To weigh them your way, run .

From the published order

Next best action

If this isn't your case

Other matchups worth comparing

How you can lose money here, and what the ranking scores
  • Control failure: a key or vote changes the rules, freezes or mints.
    Scored by Who can freeze, burn or replace your balance — and have they? · 18% (DAI 5/10, USDe 7/10)
  • Insolvency failure: the firm or issuer that owes you cannot pay.
    Scored by Who exactly owes you the dollar, and where do you rank when they fail? · 30% (DAI 2/10, USDe 1/10)
    Scored by What is really behind it, and what did the third party actually opine on? · 24% (DAI 2/10, USDe 3/10)
  • Exit failure: you cannot get out at par, on time, or with what is yours.
    Scored by Can the person actually holding it get a dollar back at par — and has anyone, at size? · 28% (DAI 4/10, USDe 1/10)
Not assessed by this ranking: Contract failure, Custody failure, Regulatory failure, Information failure. A high place says nothing about these; the Methodology tab says what each means.
Questions

Frequently asked questions

DAI scores 3 points above USDe, led by counterparty and insolvency rank and redemption right exercised. Published scores, out of 100: DAI 58 (rank 5 of 11 stablecoins), USDe 55 (rank 9 of 11).

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Written and reviewed by Founder
Reviewed Next review by Methodology v2026.10.18
How this page is reviewed

Reviewed means both products compared here was read against its sources on or after that date; every ranked category is re-read at least every 45 days. Models research, extract and parse. A deterministic engine ranks. Every quote passes an adversarial refute pass.

Accountable for this review: Mathias Siemonsmeier, Founder.

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