CryptoRefills
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Amsterdam platform selling hotel stays, flights, gift cards and mobile top-ups for six stablecoins across seven networks.
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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, documented USDS acceptance is close to nil: none of the payment gateways we profile lists it, and Flexa's ten-coin table and Bidali's carry DAI, FRAX, GUSD, USDP and several obscurer dollars but not USDS. One merchant here does take it — CryptoRefills names it on its own payment page — and that is the whole documented list as of September 2026. The practical route for everyone else is the one-for-one conversion to DAI, which a meaningful number of merchants here accept.
Pegged to the US dollar Launched 2024 1 merchant listed
Merchants accepting USDS
1 merchant in the directory. You can also filter the full directory by category, network and country.
What can you buy with USDS?
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.
USDS questions
Where can I spend USDS?
One place we can document, as of September 2026: CryptoRefills, a gift card and top-up platform, names USDS on its own payment page. We checked every payment gateway profiled on this site and the merchants with the longest published coin lists, and none of the others does. This hub therefore stays out of the search index until more do, rather than being padded. For anywhere else, convert one-for-one to DAI on Sky's own site and spend that: the DAI hub at /stablecoins/dai/ lists every merchant here that takes it. Converting to USDC works too and reaches more merchants still.
What is the difference between USDS and DAI?
USDS is the newer token introduced with the Sky rebrand and is convertible one-for-one with DAI. DAI continues to circulate and remains integrated almost everywhere USDS is not: BitPay, CoinGate and Flexa all list DAI and none lists USDS. From a payment perspective the difference is nearly total — DAI is spendable at a meaningful number of merchants and USDS, so far, at one.
Is USDS backed by dollars in a bank?
Not in the way a company-issued stablecoin is. It is issued by a protocol against on-chain collateral under governance rules, which is a different model with different risks. Sky's documentation describes the current collateral composition.