USDai wallet

What is USDai (USDAI)?

A dollar token issued by a protocol whose business is loans to operators of AI compute hardware: that is what sets USDai apart from the stablecoins most holders already know. It is issued by the USD.AI protocol, minted against USDC at one to one, backed one to one by stablecoin reserves, and built to hold a value of one dollar. USDai itself carries no exposure to those loans; the loan book, secured by GPUs and similar equipment, sits behind sUSDai, the staked token.

USDai is not sUSDai

The point most holders trip over is that USD.AI has two tokens, and only one of them is USDai. USDai is the plain dollar unit: the balance in your wallet stays exactly what you put there, and it moves like any ERC-20. sUSDai is a separate token you receive by staking USDai into the protocol; it represents a share of the loan book, its redemption value changes over time, and turning it back into USDai goes through an unstaking step with a waiting period rather than an instant swap. If you expect a balance that changes on its own, you are thinking of sUSDai. Check which contract you were actually sent before you assume anything about it.

On every network it lives on, USDai is a standard token contract, so each transfer is paid for in that network's own gas coin, which you need to hold alongside it. The ticker USDAI is short and generic, and tokens with the same or a near identical name exist elsewhere, so match the contract, not the ticker, when adding it.

Supported networks in Tangem (4): Arbitrum One, Base, Ethereum, Plasma. Tangem keeps a separate USDai balance for each of them and shows the outgoing network on screen before the card signs, so you read the network name against what the recipient expects before you tap. A dollar token spread over several chains is only comfortable to hold when the chain is visible at the moment of sending, and here it is.