USDW: one dollar for the whole Wager Predict ecosystem
Why every market now runs on USDW, and what it means for the products that come next.
Every market on Wager Predict is now denominated in USDW. If you have traded on the app recently you have already used it, even if you never saw the name: the app shows your balance in dollars, and behind that number is USDW.
This post explains what USDW is, why we built the ecosystem around it, and how it works when you deposit, trade and withdraw.
What USDW is
USDW is the ecosystem’s wrapper around USDC. It is pegged 1:1: every USDW is minted against one USDC, and every USDW can be withdrawn back to one USDC.
Deposit 100 USDC and you hold 100 USDW. Withdraw 100 USDW and you get 100 USDC back. There is no exchange rate to watch and no spread on the way in or out.
USDW lives on BNB Smart Chain at `0xe5eBE2AE0a036C955bfF58291826C50F7d670D43`.
Why a wrapper, and not plain USDC
Wager Predict is the first product in the ecosystem, not the last one.
If every contract we built were tied directly to an outside stablecoin, each new product would need its own deposit flow, its own balance and its own accounting. Users would end up moving the same dollars around again and again.
USDW gives the ecosystem a single dollar unit of its own. Every product built on Predict uses the same unit, so the balance you trade with today is the balance you will use with the products and features that come next, without a fresh deposit each time.
It also keeps the protocol’s accounting clean. USDC on BNB Smart Chain uses 18 decimal places; USDW uses 6, the same precision as a dollar to the millionth. The wrapper converts between the two when you deposit and withdraw, and every Predict contract only ever handles 6-decimal USDW. Each contract checks this when it is deployed and refuses any collateral that does not match.
How it works
Deposit. In the app, choose Deposit and enter an amount of USDC. After a one-time approval, the deposit converts your USDC into USDW at 1:1 in a single transaction.
Trade. Everything inside the protocol is priced and settled in USDW: buying and selling shares, market seeds, bonds, fees and payouts. A winning share pays out 1 USDW.
Withdraw. When you are done, withdraw your USDW back to USDC from the app, at 1:1.
What it means for you
For traders, very little changes on the surface. You deposit dollars, you see dollars, you withdraw dollars. What changes is underneath: your balance now belongs to an ecosystem rather than to a single app.
For the ecosystem, USDW is the foundation. Fees, payouts and on-chain revenue (including the protocol’s public `totalPlatformFees` counter) are all measured in the same unit, which makes the system easier to reason about, to audit and to build on.
What’s next
Prediction markets are the first thing built on USDW. As new products and features launch across the Wager Predict ecosystem, they will share the same dollar and the same balance.
The full technical details are in section 20 of the docs, “USDW collateral”: https://docs.wagerpredict.com