DOT holders approve dotUSD, Polkadot’s native stablecoin
Referendum 1944 passed on 7 October and took effect on 8 October. It creates dotUSD, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar and owned by the Polkadot protocol.
Referendum 1944 was submitted on 7 September and passed with 98.5% of the vote in favour.
dotUSD is live on Polkadot.
— Polkadot (@Polkadot) October 8, 2026
Today a handful of companies issue and control most of the world's stablecoins worth more than $250B.
Like banks, they decide who can hold them and who can’t.
dotUSD is based on a different premise. It has no issuing company and no single point of… pic.twitter.com/frGIQyLR0B
What the referendum does
- Creates a new asset, dotUSD, owned by the protocol.
- Recognises it as the Polkadot stablecoin.
- Creates a pool for DOT and dotUSD on Asset Hub, Polkadot’s chain for tokens, so that people can swap back and forth between the two.
- Uses treasury funds for the pool’s first liquidity: USD 2.5 million in USDT, the dollar stablecoin issued by Tether, is used to mint dotUSD, and USD 2.5 million in DOT goes into the pool.
- Makes dotUSD a sufficient asset, so that people can hold only dotUSD on-chain without also holding DOT.
- Sets the parameters of the PSM, the mechanism that sets details of the token such as the maximum that can be minted in the first phase.
- Creates a coinage instance for dotUSD.
How dotUSD works
dotUSD has no issuer. It runs by rules set on-chain. In the first phase, which is already on-chain, anyone can mint dotUSD one for one against USDT and redeem it for a dollar, up to a cap. In the second phase, people will lock DOT in vaults and mint dotUSD worth less than the DOT they lock. The design draws on Liquity v2, a stablecoin system on Ethereum.
Why Polkadot wants it
The leading stablecoins, Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT, are issued by companies that can freeze accounts, and stablecoins from other networks do not use DOT as collateral. Polkadot also sets its staking and treasury budgets in dollars, through its new Dynamic Allocation Pool. dotUSD lets the network pay those budgets in a dollar it governs.
The PCF’s part
Builders and developers from across the ecosystem contributed to the proposal. The PCF put it forward in an administrative role, as a member of the community. It does not deploy, run or control dotUSD; hold anyone’s assets; or provide liquidity. No funds pass through it.