Is Tron Foundation’s USDD as decentralized as it claims to be?

Sahana Kiran
Tron
Source – Unsplash

The collapse of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD [UST] created nothing but chaos in the market. While this notion persists, the Tron Foundation seemed to be increasingly confident about its stablecoin USDD. Justin Sun, the creator of the network affirmed that the over-collateralization of the stablecoin would bring about more trust and confidence in the community. As Sun continued marketing USDD as the first over-collateralized decentralized stablecoin, a Twitter user suggested otherwise.

In a recent Twitter thread, user @resdegen pointed out that USDD, at present was just 92 percent collateralized by its reserves. This was clearly way lower than the 200 percent collateral ratio it entailed. The exclusion of Tron’s native crypto TRX would further bring down the collateralization ratio to 73 percent.

The Tron network has been making massive purchases over the last couple of weeks. They are doing so to maintain the collateralization level. More recently, the network bought $50 million worth of BTC as well as TRX. However, the Twitter user pointed out that this purchase hadn’t been deposited into the reserve yet.

It was even speculated that this purchase was made from a previous accumulation of 100 million USDT that was sent to Binance from the Tron reserve.

Elaborating on the same, the Twitter user-added,

This wasn’t all. Once again, drawing a comparison between USDD and UST, @resdegen highlighted the drop in the APY. With just 11 percent APY, the community was posed with the question “Is the reward worth the risk for holders?”

The community wanted to know how USDD was decentralized and if the network was personally trading reserve assets without governance or an automated mechanism.

Tron foundation’s Justin Sun veered in and blamed the volatile market for the delay in adding the funds to the reserve.

Is Tron’s USDT reserve in danger?

Furthermore, the Twitter user pointed out how the 140 million USDT wasn’t really Tether but jUSDT instead. 140 million USDT was reportedly deposited into prominent lending and borrowing platform, JustLend. With this, the network is pocketing some yield. However, the chances of these funds being exploited were high.

Therefore, the community asked Tron what it would do if JustLend succumbed to an attack.