MAI, the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by QiDao Protocol, was trading at $0.8486 on Polygon at 10:55 UTC on September 23, 2026, about 15% below its $1 peg, according to CoinGecko. The protocol has not publicly addressed the move.
The decline was sharp and recent. CoinGecko’s chart shows MAI holding around $0.95 for most of the preceding 24 hours before dropping almost vertically to $0.8486 shortly before 11:00 UTC. Its 24-hour range runs from $0.9515 at the top to $0.8459 at the bottom, with the entire fall occurring in the final minutes of that window.
Blockaid, a blockchain security firm, flagged the depeg in a post on X at 11:26 UTC, saying miMATIC was trading about 14% below its $1 peg at around $0.84 and that the depeg was still ongoing. It identified the affected token by its Polygon contract address, 0xa3fa99a148fa48d14ed51d610c367c61876997f1.
The Numbers
CoinGecko listed MAI’s market capitalization on Polygon at $10.067 million, with 11.864 million tokens in circulation, at the time of the reading.
Its 24-hour trading volume was $83,636.79. That figure is the most important context for the size of the move: at under $100,000 of daily turnover against a $10 million market value, a relatively small sale can move the price by several percent.
CoinGecko also listed a fully diluted valuation of $258.925 million against a total supply of 302.38 million, far above the circulating figure. MAI ranks #1281 by market capitalization on the site.
The 24-hour change shown by CoinGecko was −9.8%. The roughly 14% to 15% figure cited by Blockaid measures the distance from the $1 peg rather than the change over the day.
What MAI Is
MAI, also called miMATIC, is an overcollateralized stablecoin issued by QiDao Protocol, which launched on Polygon in 2021 and describes itself as the network’s first native stablecoin protocol.
Users lock crypto collateral in smart contract vaults and mint MAI against it at 0% interest, with the protocol taking one-time minting and repayment fees rather than charging interest. The system is governed by holders of the QI token. Unlike a fiat-backed stablecoin, MAI’s peg is described by the protocol as soft, maintained through collateralized debt positions and market incentives rather than by redeeming tokens for dollars at a fixed rate.
What Is Not Known
QiDao has not published a statement on the depeg, and no cause has been established. Nothing has been disclosed about vault health, collateral levels, or liquidations, and no protocol exploit has been reported.
Blockaid’s alerts are automated market monitoring and do not identify a cause.
This is a developing story. The Crypto Times contacted QiDao Protocol for comment at 1:00 PM UTC and will update this report as more information becomes available.
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