DAI stablecoin drops to 96 cents as support is announced for prediction market Augur

The DAI stablecoin lost its $1 peg and is currently trading closer to 96 cents as the decentralised and Ethereum-backed project looks to grow in the wild markets of high volatility and ever-changing supply and demand.

The DAI and MKR project is tipped to become the stablecoin of choice for ETH HODLers due to its ‘on-chain’ governance decided by holders of the MKR token. However, that governance has been going through some troubles recently, as over the last few months MKR holders have been voting on a series of proposals to raise the stability fees of DAI from 0.5% all the way up to 7.5%.

Stability fees are charged when a user uses the MakerDAO platform to create DAI stablecoins by locking Ethereum (ETH) into the project’s CDP (Collateralised Debt Position) contracts. The amount of ETH needed to generate DAI depends on what level of collateralisation a user chooses when creating the contract, but at the time of creation, they must have at least 150% of the USD value of DAI created based on the current USD price of ETH.

If a user chooses to cash in their DAI and unlock the Ethereum from the CDP, they must then pay the stability fee, which is currently set at 7.5% a year.

New addition to Augur

You will soon be able to place a ‘stable’ bet on the decentralised prediction market Augur after the platform announced support for its number one user request – the DAI stablecoin.

The news of DAI’s most recent breakdown from its $1 peg comes after Augur was recently criticised by Binance after it discovered ‘irregularities’ that have been plaguing the prediction markets.

In spite of the scathing review of the platform, Binance did however say: “To their credit, the Augur team has already identified several of the considerations mentioned, as well as other potential improvements to consider for the second version of the platform.”

That second version has now been released, and on top of the stablecoin support, we can see other features including mandatory fork participation. The company said in a press release: “Augur v2 will incentivise 100% REP holder participation in case of a fork. REP holders who don’t participate in a v2 Augur fork will lose all of their REP tokens. Contracts won’t allow migration to the child universe after 60 days allotted period.”

Another interesting upgrade is the use of the ERC-777 standard which will look to eliminate a “clunky UX problem” according to the team. The press release also spoke about tokenised KYC support and affiliate marketing opportunities (which I assume means a referral program).

Losing its peg

Looking at the DAI stablecoin charts, we can see that daily trading volume has held around $40 million since a significant spike in the market around mid-February. Since then, the supply of the stablecoin has risen from just above $70 million to close to $100 million as a new flurry of Ethereum has been locked into the DAI contract.

The charging and, more importantly, the raising of the stability fee has failed to control the supply/demand equation and hold the project’s $1 peg as the price of the asset has fluctuated between $1.04 and $0.93 over the last 30 days.

News and new demand coming from the Augur release should be positive for the innovative stablecoin concept. Over the longer term, the project will be judged on its ability to hold its peg (amid market volatility) and to grow in terms of market cap.