Cardano’s Djed Stablecoin Officially Launches on Mainnet

Djed, Cardano's first algorithmic stablecoin, has officially launched on the mainnet after over a year of development and anticipation.

Update on February 1, 2023:

Less than a day after its launch, by the afternoon of February 1, over 1.7 million DJED tokens had been issued, with nearly 20.8 million SHEN tokens in circulation. At the time of the update, with ADA priced at $0.38, 1 DJED was valued at 2.67 ADA ($1.014), and 1 SHEN was valued at 1.09 ADA ($0.4).

A total of 27 million ADA, worth $10.2 million, has been deposited into the DJED/SHEN contract as collateral, achieving a collateralization ratio of nearly 600%.

Supply and Price Details for DJED and SHEN. Screenshot from Djed's website at 3:25 PM on February 1, 2023

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Djed has been developed collaboratively by layer-1 platform COTI and Cardano's core development team, Input Output Global, over the past year.

As initially planned, Djed is pegged 1:1 to the USD, over-collateralized with ADA (similar to DAI), and uses SHEN as its reserve currency. DJED is backed by ADA with a reserve ratio of 400-800% to minimize the risk of deviating from its value peg.

Djed is intended to be used across DeFi protocols within the Cardano ecosystem as a stable alternative. COTI has revealed plans to include additional coins such as wrapped BTC (WBTC) and wrapped ETH (WETH) as collateral for minting Djed on Cardano.

The project aims to integrate this algorithmic stablecoin into 40 applications within the Cardano ecosystem. Several decentralized exchanges, including MinSwap, Wingriders, and MuesliSwap, have already begun supporting the stablecoin.

COTI previously shared with The Block that they plan to launch DjedPay, a service for payments using Djed, at the same time.

Ahead of today's significant milestone, ADA has seen a slight increase, hovering around $0.36 – $0.38. However, the 24-hour trading volume has decreased by approximately 6%.

15m Chart of ADA/USDT on Binance as of 10:05 PM on January 31, 2023

In addition to Djed, another stablecoin named USDA is also expected to launch in early 2023, though detailed information has yet to be released.