HostDAI vs WETH — price, size and safety, side by side
DAI (Ethereum) vs WETH (Ethereum) — every figure is the freshest dated measurement we hold for that token, never a live-feed guess. Prices stamped 2026-10-17 / 2026-10-17.
DAI vs WETH — normalized performance, 2026-09-08 to 2026-10-17T03:15:24
| DAI | WETH | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0.9976 | $2.42K |
| Market cap | $4.56B | $5.41B |
| 24h volume | $10.35M DEX | $462.86M DEX |
| Liquidity | $53.63M | $902.53M |
| FDV | $4.55B | $5.39B |
| Holders | 710,510 | 3,680,746 |
| Age (days) | 1,526 | 1,727 |
| Safety grade | B | A |
Where they differ
- WETH measures ~17× the liquidity of DAI
- WETH measures ~45× the 24h volume of DAI
- WETH measures ~5.2× the holder count of DAI
What the data says
DAI
DAI answered a question the other stablecoins on this site don't ask: can a dollar exist on-chain without a company behind it? Since 2019, the contract at 0x6b175474e89094c44da98b954eedeac495271d0f has held near a dollar not because anyone promises redemption at a bank, but because every DAI is minted against locked crypto collateral worth more than it, with interest rates and liquidations — governed by MakerDAO, now rebranded Sky — doing the work a treasurer would. No single company can freeze your DAI or pause the contract; that censorship-resistance is the property its holders are actually paying for.
The honest complications have grown over the years. A large share of DAI's backing has long included centralized stablecoins and real-world assets, which reimports a slice of the issuer risk the design was born to escape — the March 2023 weekend when USDC's depeg dragged DAI to roughly $0.89 alongside it made that dependency visible. And the 2024 rebrand to Sky, with its upgrade path to the newer USDS token, means DAI is now the legacy branch of its own ecosystem: still enormous, still redeemable through the same machinery, but no longer where its creators' roadmap points. Neither fact is a defect; both belong in the price of holding it.
WETH
WETH is the oldest load-bearing contract in DeFi. Deployed in December 2017 as WETH9, the contract at 0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead9083c756cc2 does exactly one thing: wrap ETH — which predates the ERC-20 standard and doesn't conform to it — into a token that does, redeemable one-for-one, instantly, by anyone, forever. It has no owner, no admin functions, no upgrade path, and no pause switch. Nearly every DEX trade, lending market, and NFT sale on Ethereum has settled through it at some point; it is less a token than a piece of the chain's plumbing.
That architecture is why the usual checklist comes back almost empty. There is no team to rug, no supply policy to abuse — WETH supply is simply however much ETH is currently deposited in the contract, minted on wrap and burned on unwrap. The failure mode people theorize about (the contract holding less ETH than WETH outstanding) would require a bug that eight-plus years of the highest-value adversarial testing in crypto has not found. HostDeFi's October 9, 2026 snapshot shows roughly $903 million of tracked pool liquidity and $73 million of daily volume on this deployment, and both understate reality — WETH is one side of thousands of pools our sample doesn't enumerate.
FAQ
Which is bigger, DAI or WETH?
By tracked market cap: DAI (Ethereum) measures $4.56B and WETH (Ethereum) measures $5.41B — dated snapshots, not a live feed.
Which is safer, DAI or WETH?
On the contract checks we publish: DAI (Ethereum) grades B and WETH (Ethereum) grades A. A grade is a structural check on the contract, not a promise about the asset.
How have DAI and WETH performed over the shared window?
Between 2026-09-08 and 2026-10-17T03:15:24, the measured snapshots show DAI at −0.26% and WETH at −2.19%.
The grade column is the one CMC's compare page cannot print — our grade is computed from the contract itself (mint/freeze authority, liquidity, holder concentration). Changes are measured over the shared window stated on the chart, 2026-09-08→2026-10-17T03:15:24; a token with fewer measured points measures a shorter span inside it.
Figures are dated on-chain snapshots, not a live feed. Safety grades are structural checks — not investment advice. Free · no signup · a HostDeFi product.