Terra's Stablecoin UST Overtakes DAI in Market Cap: CoinGecko Data

The U.S. dollar tracking stablecoin of the Terra blockchain, TerraUSD (UST), has crossed ahead of DAI in terms of market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.

UST now has a market cap of $9.3B as opposed to DAI, which has a market cap of $9.0B on the site. However, DAIStats currently shows 9.3B DAI. CoinMarketCap still shows DAI ahead of UST by $84M, as of noon New York time.

At the beginning of December, DAI was at $8.871B and UST was at $7.659B, according to CoinGecko. DAI’s market cap has largely trended between $8.5 and $9B since early November on the site.

Voted to Burn

UST has been trending up more sharply over that same time period. It started Nov. at under $3B. A major portion of its gains came in mid-November after the Terra community voted to burn 89M LUNA accumulated in the Terra treasury in exchange for UST. According to Do Kwon, $2.7B had been minted this way.

The sharp increase in UST ended on Nov. 22. Nevertheless, UST’s supply has continued to grow at a faster clip than DAI. TerraUSD was first released in April 2019, nearly a year-and-a-half after MakerDAO first released DAI.

DAI is a collateralized stablecoin. Each DAI represents a loan that a user has taken out against some asset permitted by the holders of the MKR token, the governance token for MakerDAO.

Algorithmic Stablecoin

UST is an algorithmic stablecoin that runs on its own Tendermint blockchain. The supply is expanded and contracted using Terra’s governance token, LUNA. LUNA has been the top performing decentralized finance (DeFi) asset in the last quarter. Originally envisioned as a way to help ecommerce companies save money versus credit card transactions, the Terra ecosystem has evolved into a DeFi contender. It boasts popular protocols, such as Anchor, which offers high-yield savings, and Mirror, which offers synthetic assets.

The United States Securities Enforcement Commission is currently investigating Mirror.