USDD was announced by Justin Sun, TRON's founder, in April 2022, and launched on May 5, 2022, issued by the TRON DAO Reserve — just 5 days before the catastrophic collapse of the Terra ecosystem and its algorithmic stablecoin, UST. USDD was deliberately modeled on UST's design: a “mint-and-burn” mechanism where burning $1 worth of TRX mints 1 USDD.
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Available from launch on TRON, Ethereum, and BNB Chain, via TRON's BTTC cross-chain solution.
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TRON DAO (which became fully decentralized in December 2021, and was described by Forbes as likely the world's largest DAO at the time) set an initial reserve target of $10 billion; at launch, supply was more than 50% TRX-backed.
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The staking yield was notably high (up to 30% annually) — a similarly aggressive yield promise to what UST's Anchor Protocol offered before its own collapse.
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October 2022: USDD becomes the official legal tender of the Commonwealth of Dominica (a Caribbean island nation) — an unusual, genuine sovereign-level adoption milestone.