USDS · issued by Sky (formerly MakerDAO)
Where can you spend USDS?
USDS is the dollar stablecoin of the Sky protocol, the rebranded successor to MakerDAO, introduced in 2024 alongside a broader restructuring of that ecosystem. It is convertible one-for-one with DAI, which continues to exist, and it inherits the same fundamental design: a decentralised protocol issuing a dollar-denominated token against collateral rather than a company issuing against a bank balance. For merchant payments, USDS acceptance is currently narrow — it is a newer token and gateways have been slower to list it than the two market leaders. Where you find it, it is typically at crypto-native merchants and DeFi-adjacent services.
Merchants accepting USDS
We do not yet have verified merchants accepting USDS in the directory. That is a statement about our coverage as much as about the market — if you know a business that accepts it, tell us . In the meantime, converting to USDC is the practical route to most merchants here.
USDS is worth understanding as a category rather than as a competitor to USDC — it works differently enough that comparing them on merchant acceptance alone misses the point.
Protocol-issued versus company-issued
Most stablecoins you can spend are liabilities of a company. You hold a token; the company holds dollars and Treasuries; you can, in principle, redeem with them. Supervision, attestation and counterparty risk all follow from that structure.
USDS is issued by a protocol against collateral, governed on-chain. There is no company to redeem with and no bank account behind it in the conventional sense. Whether that is better or worse depends entirely on what you are worried about: it removes a single corporate counterparty and introduces governance, collateral and smart-contract risk in its place.
For a payment held for four minutes between your wallet and a merchant’s, neither model’s risks are especially relevant. For a balance you hold for a year, they are worth understanding.
Merchant acceptance today
Narrow. USDS is newer than the tokens gateways enabled by default, and gateway listing decisions are slow-moving. In practice you will find it at crypto-native merchants and services whose payment provider supports a long asset list.
If you hold USDS and the merchant does not list it, converting to USDC is a normal on-chain swap and usually the pragmatic answer.
Its relationship with DAI
DAI has not gone away and remains the more widely accepted of the two, simply because it has existed far longer and is integrated in more places. The two are convertible one-for-one. If you are optimising purely for spendability today, DAI has the edge; the direction of travel within the ecosystem is toward USDS.