[runako]

I've only skimmed the white paper, but this appears to be a "stablecoin" backed by crypto assets. Is that correct?

The white paper is complex, and the Emergency Shutdown price stability mechanism appears exposed to ETH price risk such that if ETH moves rapidly around the Emergency Shutdown, there's no guarantee that Dai holders could recoup on a 1:1 basis. Is that correct?

This seems to be not a dependable peg.

[miracle2k]

The Bank of England couldn't keep their peg, so what's the gold standard for a dependable cross-asset peg then?

DAI has been tremendously successful over multiple years and multiple bear markets and ETH price crashes; it can only do so much of course. If ETH goes to zero tomorrow, DAI holders will not be able to recoup, sure.

In fact, the real problem with DAI is that demand often exceeds supply, the latter being limited by people who want to go long ETH, so they keep having to fight DAI breaking the peg in the other direction. To solve this, they onboarded other collateral types, including the USDC stablecoin, which now unfortunately accounts for >50% of DAI collateral.

[runako]

> The Bank of England couldn't keep their peg, so what's the gold standard for a dependable cross-asset peg then?

I'm not a crypto expert, but naively I would at a minimum expect uncorrelated collateral to be part of the picture. DAI runs on ETH, so collateralizing via an ETH mechanism seems like possibly not the best choice.

I would expect that the peg would depend on something that exhibits a low correlation with crypto asset prices and a very high and dependable correlation with USD, like money market funds or Treasuries.

[Sargos]

Dai is backed by lots of different assets in the Maker Vaults. Most of them are crypto but they just added some real estate assets and the plan from day one has been to add as much diversified collateral as possible for safety and scale (Dai can't scale big enough to service the entire world on crypto backing alone).

[riffraff]

How are non-crypto assets represented in crypto space?

It seems you would need a trusted party/oracle of some kind, which creates the same problem as centralized stablecoins anew.

Edit: indeed a sibling comment mentions they have USDC as a backing support which means they are as stable as that.

[whimsicalism]

> It seems you would need a trusted party/oracle of some kind, which creates the same problem as centralized stablecoins anew.

If it is multicollateral, then yes, it somewhat involves trust, but you are dependent on a lot of various people betraying trusts along with ethereum price dipping, whereas a traditional stablecoin is entirely dependent on one entity.

[shkkmo]

Divirsification of assets does help reduce risk. However, you can't eliminate that risk without holding reserves that are entirely made up of the pegged currency.