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History
The creation of a new stablecoin protocol started in 2020 as a collaboration between researchers and engineers who were then affiliated with Ergo, Emurgo and Input Output. Implementations for the Ergo and Cardano ecosystems were planned and they were provisionally named, respectively, AgeUSD and BelUSD after the Egyptian myth of the twin brothers Agenor and Belus.
In Q1 2021, the first implementation, in ErgoScript, was completed and deployed to Ergo under the name SigmaUSD (instead of AgeUSD).
In July 2021, the technical white paper was released to the public and the protocol was named Djed, after an ancient Egyptian pillar-like symbol representing stability.
In 2021, some of the engineers from the initial team founded dcSpark and created Milkomeda-C1, an EVM sidechain of Cardano. Together with VacuumLabs and other anonymous entities, they implemented the Djed stablecoin protocol in Solidity and deployed it to a testnet of Milkomeda-C1 in Q1 2022.
In 2021 and 2022, Input Output and COTI developed a Plutus implementation of Djed, which was eventually released by COTI on Cardano in February 2023.
In February 2022, the Djed Alliance was founded, to bring stability to the cryptocurrency industry by fostering the evolution of the Djed stablecoin protocol and by supporting implementations and deployments of the protocol.
The Djed Alliance assisted COTI in its AMA about COTI's Djed in June 2022, participated in the Ergo Summit in August 2022 with a talk on how to improve Djed and SigmaUSD and co-organized a Hackathon with Ergo in September 2022.
In 2022, the Djed Alliance published a stablecoin report with the Blockchain Governance Initiative Network (BGIN) and started an ongoing research collaboration with Prof. Giselle Reis, Mohammad Shaheer and Demetre Devidze from CMU Qatar, to research variants of Djed as well as formally verified oracles.
In February 2023, after a long and thorough peer-review process, the academic paper about the minimal version of Djed, authored by Joachim Zahnentferner, Dmytro Kaidalov, Javier Díaz and Jean-Frédéric Etienne, was accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.
There is no formal membership in the Djed Alliance. Contributions to Djed implementations and deployments do not necessarily imply any relationship with the Djed Alliance. And the fact that a particular implementation or deployment is part of Djed's history does not necessarily imply that the Djed Alliance endorses it.