Justin Sun says removing 12K Bitcoin from USDD is just ‘DeFi 101’

USDD’s Bitcoin collateral was removed without a vote from its DAO, but Justin Sun insists it’s a normal event in DeFi.

Tron founder Justin Sun has played down concerns after the removal of 12,000 Bitcoin used as backing for Decentralized USD, a stablecoin governed by the Tron DAO Reserve. 

Blockchain explorer Blockchair shows 12,000 Bitcoin (BTC), worth over $729 million, was removed from an address on Aug. 19 that was previously listed as holding some of the collateral for Decentralized USD (USDD). 

Some on X allege Sun himself was responsible for the move. While others have raised concerns that Bitcoin was removed without a vote from the TRON DAO Reserve.

According to the governance page, the latest and only question that has been put to a community vote was whether to use burned Tron (TRX) tokens on May 2023.

In an Aug. 22 statement on X, Sun played down concerns, arguing that USDD’s mechanism is similar to MakerDAO’s DAI and allows for a collateral hodler to withdraw without approval if collateral exceeds an amount specified by the system. 

“This is part of the basics of DeFi 101. Currently, USDD has a long-term collateralization rate exceeding 300%, which means that the capital utilization is not very efficient.”

Cointelegraph has reached out to MakerDAO to comment on the claim.

USDD no longer backed by Bitcoin

The Bitcoin address that held the collateral has been removed from the USDD’s transparency page, which now shows the stablecoin is backed primarily by Tether (USDT) and TRX.

USDD’s transparency page currently shows over 744 million USDD are in circulation. The stablecoin’s transparency page lists $1.7 billion worth of TRX and USDT in its reserves, giving it a collateralized ratio of over 230%. 

This means USDD indeed has more assets than stablecoins in circulation. In comparison, Dai (DAI) is 120% collateralized, and USDT and CircleUSD (USDC) are only 100% collateralized.

Related: Sun rises: Tron’s new memecoin deployer flips Pump.fun

USDD launched in 2022 as a competitor to Terra’s now-defunct TerraUSD (UST) token. Like USDC and USDT, its value is supposed to be pegged to the US dollar. 

However, it has experienced some volatility, achieving an all-time low of $0.92 on March 11, 2023, according to CoinMarketCap. 

Magazine: Dorsey’s ‘marketplace of algorithms’ could fix social media… so why hasn’t it?