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Head-to-head · Stablecoins

USDe vs USDS (Sky) Same published score.

USDe and USDS (Sky) tie on score at 55; the published tie-break orders them. USDe is ahead on reserve and assurance scope and seizure and upgrade authority. USDe ranks #9 and USDS (Sky) #10 of 11 published stablecoins. The ledger below shows where each side is ahead — pick by the criterion that matters to you.

USDe55
USDS (Sky)55
Scores are out of 100; published scores fall within 41–99 · ranks #9 and #10 of 11
Methodology v2026.10.18Ranking snapshot Evidence verified through 4 published criteria5 score dimensions Receipt #cc-VS-USDE-VS-USDS-SKY-025d5782
Published verdictRanking snapshot 3 November 2026

Same published score — 55 each

USDe and USDS (Sky) tie on score at 55; the published tie-break orders them. USDe is ahead on reserve and assurance scope and seizure and upgrade authority.

USDe #9 of 1155
USDS (Sky) #10 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 termUSDe leads on 2 of 4 published criteria; USDS (Sky) on 1. The terms sum to the gap.
TermUSDeUSDS (Sky)WeightPoints
Redemption right exercised1/104/106.7−5.2for USDS (Sky)−2.7 of 32
Reserve and assurance scope3/101/105.8+3.0for USDe+1.5 of 32
Seizure and upgrade authority7/105/104.3+2.2for USDe+1.2 of 32
Net of the terms0.0
Reproduced gap0.0

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

  • A row-above bound on one row means the criterion arithmetic does not reproduce the displayed gap exactly.
Quick facts

At a glance

2 of 3 rows read the same for both.
FactUSDeUSDS (Sky)
PricingSnapshotISSUER 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.MINT/REDEEM FEES AND MINIMUMS ARE NOT IN ANY BINDING DOCUMENT. The Skybase International Terms of Use (https://docs.sky.money/legal/skybase-international/terms-of-use, "Version: 2.0 | Last Modified: 1 September 2026", fetched 29 September 2026) is the silent page: 0 occurrences of "redeem" or "redemption", and no fee schedule or minimum of any kind for acquiring or exiting USDS. The only published pricing sits in the protocol documentation and on-chain. Sky Protocol Docs, https://developers.sky.money/protocol/tokens/usds/ (redirects to developers.skyeco.com, fetched 29 September 2026), DAI USDS Converter: "Converts DAI to USDS at a fixed ratio of 1:1 and vice versa." / "No fees assessed." / "Fees cannot be enabled on this route in the future." Sky Protocol Docs, https://developers.sky.money/guides/psm/litepsm/ (fetched 29 September 2026): "The tin fee is assessed on all sellGem transactions, and the tout fee is assessed on all buyGem transactions. Both tin and tout values are set by Sky Ecosystem governance." and "All users, both public and authorized, can only swap up to the DAI and USDC balances held by LitePSM-DAI-USDC." CURRENT VALUES, all read at ONE Ethereum block, 26,082,220 (2026-09-29T09:26:59Z) via https://ethereum-rpc.publicnode.com: LitePSM-DAI-USDC 0xf6e72Db5454dd049d0788e411b06CfAF16853042 tin() = 0 and tout() = 0; LitePSMWrapper-USDS-USDC 0xA188EEC8F81263234dA3622A406892F3D630f98c tin() = 0 and tout() = 0. No minimum size is published or enforced on either route; the practical ceiling is module inventory — 4,133,680,653.128042 USDC in the Pocket 0x37305B1cD40574E4C5Ce33f8e8306Be057fD7341 at that block against a USDS totalSupply of 6,672,590,279.74 (label: on-chain reads, true only at the stamped block). Marketing counterpart on https://sky.money/ (fetched 29 September 2026), reworded since August: "Swap anytime. No fees, no slippage."
Asset coverageEditorial——
Region fitSnapshotglobalglobal
From the published criteria

Which should you pick?

USDe

55#9 of 11
Pick it when
Pick USDe if reserve and assurance scope matters most — it scores 3/10 to USDS (Sky)'s 1/10 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.

USDS (Sky)

55#10 of 11
Pick it when
Pick USDS (Sky) if redemption right exercised matters most — it scores 4/10 to USDe's 1/10 there (weight 28).
Strength
Seizure and upgrade authority — 5/10
Tradeoff
That nobody is on the other side. Sky's binding Terms of Use (Version 2.0, last modified 1 September 2026) contain zero occurrences of the words "redeem" or "redemption", and the same document states that Skybase International "is not a subsidiary, agent, or representative of the Sky Protocol" and that neither it nor its affiliates are "party to any transaction on the Sky Protocol" — so there is no entity a holder can present USDS to for a dollar, and no insolvency rank to hold. The par exit everyone actually uses is a swap into USDC through a governance-owned module, and Sky's own protocol documentation says "Governance can set either tin or tout to the value of type(uint256).max , halting sellGem and buyGem transactions respectively on the LitePSM. Transactions would be halted for both public and authorized users." while sky.money's homepage advertises "Swap anytime. No fees, no slippage." Worse than the fee switch: the DAI leg's converter is genuinely immutable, but it mints through UsdsJoin, whose mint call is auth-gated on the token, so a single deny() from the pause proxy severs that route too. A buyer who read only the homepage would learn none of this.
Self-identify in 10 seconds

Which one is actually for you?

USDe

Choose USDe if reserve and assurance scope matters most

  • Reserve and assurance scope: 3/10 against 1/10 for USDS (Sky) (weight 24)
  • Seizure and upgrade authority: 7/10 against 5/10 for USDS (Sky) (weight 18)
USDS (Sky)

Choose USDS (Sky) if redemption right exercised matters most

  • Redemption right exercised: 4/10 against 1/10 for USDe (weight 28)
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

weight 7.2 of 86Tie
USDe1 out of 10
USDS (Sky)1 out of 10

Redemption right exercised

by 3 of 10weight 6.7 of 86USDS (Sky) leads
USDe1 out of 10
USDS (Sky)4 out of 10

Reserve and assurance scope

by 2 of 10weight 5.8 of 86USDe leads
USDe3 out of 10
USDS (Sky)1 out of 10

Seizure and upgrade authority

by 2 of 10weight 4.3 of 86USDe leads
USDe7 out of 10
USDS (Sky)5 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
USDe14/20USDS (Sky)14/20
Tie
Published criteriaweight 30 of 86
USDe6.1/30USDS (Sky)6.1/30
Tie
Frictionweight 10 of 86 · constant here
USDe2.7/10USDS (Sky)2.7/10
Tie
Trust recordweight 8 of 86 · constant here
USDe3.2/8USDS (Sky)3.2/8
Tie
Measured dataweight 18 of 86 · constant here
USDe8.3/18USDS (Sky)8.3/18
Tie
Decision rulePublished order

Same published score — pick by the criterion that matters to you.

Pick USDe if reserve and assurance scope matters most — it scores 3/10 to USDS (Sky)'s 1/10 there (weight 24).

Pick USDS (Sky) if redemption right exercised matters most — it scores 4/10 to USDe's 1/10 there (weight 28).

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% (USDe 7/10, USDS (Sky) 5/10)
  • 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% (USDe 1/10, USDS (Sky) 1/10)
    Scored by What is really behind it, and what did the third party actually opine on? · 24% (USDe 3/10, USDS (Sky) 1/10)
  • 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% (USDe 1/10, USDS (Sky) 4/10)
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

USDe and USDS (Sky) tie on score at 55; the published tie-break orders them. USDe is ahead on reserve and assurance scope and seizure and upgrade authority. Published scores, out of 100: USDe 55 (rank 9 of 11 stablecoins), USDS (Sky) 55 (rank 10 of 11).

Related pages

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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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