Topics
Latest
Exchanges & trading
Custody & wallets
Yield & lending
DeFi & infrastructure
NFT & consumer
Business services
Stablecoins ranked on reserve quality, attestations, peg record and redemption. Every score below is the weighted mean of the rubric marks, not an editor's gut feel.
Pax DollarBest for: Regulated dollars with a long, quiet record9.0/10
USDCBest for: The best-documented dollar token in crypto9.0/10
Circle EURCBest for: Euro exposure on-chain8.9/10
PayPal USDBest for: A stablecoin with a mainstream payments company behind it8.9/10
Ripple RLUSDBest for: A new regulated dollar with institutional distribution8.3/10
Liquity LUSDBest for: Immutable, governance-free dollars7.9/10| # | Service | Score | Best for | Fees | Since |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pax DollarExceptional | 9.0/10 | Regulated dollars with a long, quiet record | ||
| 2 | USDCExceptional | 9.0/10 | The best-documented dollar token in crypto | ||
| 3 | Circle EURCStrong | 8.9/10 | Euro exposure on-chain | ||
| 4 | PayPal USDStrong | 8.9/10 | A stablecoin with a mainstream payments company behind it | ||
| 5 | Ripple RLUSDStrong | 8.3/10 | A new regulated dollar with institutional distribution | ||
| 6 | Liquity LUSDSolid | 7.9/10 | Immutable, governance-free dollars | ||
| 7 |  crvUSDSolid | 7.5/10 | Borrowing dollars with soft liquidation | ||
| 8 |  DAISolid | 7.5/10 | The longest-running decentralised stablecoin | ||
| 9 |  USDS (Sky)Solid | 7.5/10 | On-chain collateralised dollars with a savings rate | ||
| 10 |  GHOSolid | 7.1/10 | Borrowing against Aave collateral | ||
| 11 |  First Digital USDMixed | 6.6/10 | Binance trading pairs | ||
| 12 |  Ethena USDeMixed | 6.5/10 | Yield from the basis trade, in dollar-denominated form | ||
| 13 |  Tether USDTMixed | 6.5/10 | Unmatched liquidity everywhere in the world | ||
| 14 |  USD1Weak | 5.9/10 | Nothing we would recommend over the alternatives above | ||
| 15 |  USDDAvoid | 4.5/10 | Tron ecosystem use, with reservations |
Seven years of a very boring peg, under New York trust regulation, with almost nobody using it.
Cash and short treasuries, monthly attestations, a public issuer, and one bad weekend in March 2023 that it survived at par.
The most credible euro stablecoin: same issuer standards as USDC, a fraction of the liquidity.
Issued by Paxos under New York supervision and backed by treasuries — conservative, well-regulated and still small.
Launched under a New York trust charter with treasury backing, and still building the distribution that would make it matter.
ETH-backed, immutable, and redeemable at par by anyone at any time — the purest design in the category.
Fully on-chain, over-collateralised, and built on the only liquidation mechanism that does not wipe you out at a threshold.
Eight years without breaking, including the day the mechanism failed and the system recapitalised itself in public.
DAI's successor: on-chain collateral you can verify, plus a growing wedge of off-chain credit you cannot.
Aave's own dollar, backed by the same collateral machinery that makes Aave safe, and slow to hold its peg.
Large by volume because one exchange promotes it, with disclosure that has not kept pace with its size.
Not a dollar with reserves but a hedged position that behaves like one — well disclosed, and structurally different from everything above it.
The most used dollar in crypto and the least verified: enormous profits, real treasury holdings, and still no full audit after a decade.
Treasury-backed on paper and politically entangled in practice — a stablecoin whose main risk is not its reserves.
Launched as an algorithmic dollar weeks before Terra collapsed, restructured since, and still the least verifiable stablecoin we rate.
Score = Σ (mark × weight), rounded to 0.1. A criterion with nothing published scores 0.
A stablecoin is a promise, and the only question that matters is what stands behind it. Reserve quality therefore carries the single heaviest weight of any criterion in our ratings: short-dated treasuries and cash at regulated banks are not the same asset as commercial paper, secured loans or a delta-hedged futures position, however stable the token has been so far.
Attestation is scored on rigour, not frequency. A monthly attestation is a point-in-time snapshot signed by an accountant, not an audit of the issuer's financial statements. We mark up issuers who publish full audited accounts and mark down those whose disclosure is a one-page letter.
USDC traded to 87 cents in March 2023 while being fully backed, because the market could not verify a bank balance over a weekend. DAI followed it down because it was collateralised by USDC. A depeg measures how fast the market can confirm the backing, and how deep the redemption channel is — both worth knowing.
Several instruments in this list pay a yield. That yield comes from somewhere — treasury bills, lending, or perpetual funding — and each source has a failure mode. We score these as what they are: investment products with stable-value mechanics, not cash.
