Indigo Protocol iETH wallet

What is Indigo Protocol iETH (IETH)?

What you are actually holding

iETH follows the price of ether on Cardano. It is minted, not bridged: someone locks ADA in a collateralized debt position and issues iETH against it, keeping that position above a minimum collateralization ratio the Indigo DAO sets. No ether sits behind it and none can be claimed from it. The link to ether's price comes from over-collateralization in ADA and from a stability pool that takes over positions which fall below the ratio.

That distinction matters most if you bought iETH on a Cardano DEX and assume you can take real ether out somewhere. You cannot. The exits are burning it against a position inside Indigo, or selling it back into ADA or another Cardano asset. Liquidation, likewise, is the concern of whoever minted the token, not of someone who simply holds it.

Two more things a holder runs into. The ticker travels badly: unrelated tokens elsewhere use IETH for vault shares and for wrapped ether, and none of them are this asset. And because iETH is a Cardano native asset, it shares UTXOs with your ADA, so some ADA has to be present for fees and for the minimum that accompanies any native token.

Tangem lists it as the Cardano asset it is, with a balance of its own that nothing else sharing the name gets mixed into, and it names the network a transfer is leaving on before the card signs. That is a glance worth taking every time with a token this easy to confuse, and it is the reason this one sits comfortably on a card.

Supported networks in Tangem (1): Cardano.