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Overview

USD+ is the dollar-pegged stablecoin of the Radian Protocol and is a core component which enables unique features of the Radian Protocol.

Radian achieves an efficient representation of value by "summing" locked values of multiple assets into a single numerical value, which is used across the protocol to avoid iteration and provide an efficient DeFi Protocol.

In order to make this possible, since even the value of RAD itself will fluctate, the denominator of the value of the protocol must be a stable value. This is where USD+ comes in.

Below we explain the mechanics of USD+, and how it is used in the Radian Protocol.

In the Collector​

The collector acts as a treasury for the protocol, and can contain any type of asset, whether it be ERC-20 tokens, NFTs, or even ETH. The value of RAD itself is proportional to locked assets in the collector. It order to derive a common denominator for the value of the protocol, all exchange rates are always denomiated in USD+.

In the Exchange​

Unlike other AMMs, the Radian Exchange does not allow arbitraty assets to be on both sides. Instead, USD+ must always be on one side. Since USD+ is itself backed by RAD, this means that liquidity pools in Radian are also implicitly backed by RAD.

There are two reasons why having USD+ always on one side is important:

  1. It allows for a more efficient calculation of exchange rates and therefore lower gas costs, since it reduces computational complexity on one side of the pool (e.g. multiplying by 1 rather than price).
  2. Routing becomes much more efficient, since it guarantees a maximum of 2 hops to get from any asset to any other asset, whereas the max is unbounded in other AMMs such as Uniswap.