MakerDAO 'torpedoing in weird directions,' Vitalik Buterin says

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has revised his views regarding the governance approach of the RAI stablecoin community following MakerDAO co-founder and CEO Rune Christensen's proposal to use the Solana codebase.

Buterin previously held a more conservative stance on the matter. However, responding to a post on Reflexer’s Discord server over the weekend regarding Christensen’s proposal — that asked, "this is satire right?" — Buterin said the developments led him to believe that more activist governance might benefit RAI. Colin Wu first reported on the comments.

"I think it's somewhat more okay than before for the RAI community to have somewhat more activist governance than I thought before," Buterin said. "Not going all the way, but like being okay with doing more active governance to support staked ETH, and ideally intentionally accepting only non-dominant forms of staked ETH (so, not Lido)."

Buterin's initial perspective was influenced by his three-part schema on stablecoins — comparing centralized stablecoins like USDC and USDT with DAO-governed real-world asset-backed stablecoins like DAI and governance-minimized crypto-backed stablecoins like RAI and LUSD. 

Where MakerDAO was the leading project in the DAO-governed real-world asset-backed niche, it made sense from a RAI and Ethereum ecosystem perspective for RAI to take on the minimalistic niche, differentiating itself from MakerDAO, Buterin said.

However, "if MakerDAO is torpedoing itself in weird directions, then it makes natural sense for RAI to move somewhat closer to that middle category," Buterin added. "Not all the way; I think there is value in maintaining some kind of norm of 'ETH is the collateral.'"

MakerDAO's Solana Endgame

Buterin made headlines on Saturday by liquidating his remaining 500 MakerDAO tokens for 353 ether ($580,000) following Christensen's proposal.

Christensen's blog post on Friday outlined the final phase of a multistep "Endgame" plan involving the "complete reimplementation of the entire Maker Protocol built natively on a new, stand-alone blockchain," called NewChain. Christensen stated a preference to use Solana rather than Ethereum. However, Cosmos was also identified as an alternative.

Though some years away and not set in stone, the proposal faced criticism over the perceived abandonment of the Ethereum ecosystem. "Your user base primarily has more allegiance to Ethereum than to Maker/Dai. [You] should probably give that more weight than you currently are," one user said.

"Guys… Ethereum is great. Solana is great. Cosmos is great, etc.," Christensen responded. "All chains are increasingly interconnected and synergize to form a global multichain network economy. Tribalist incels (of every flavor) are in the wrong decade, go back to bitcoin and let the rest of us build."

MakerDAO's DAI is currently the third-largest USD-pegged stablecoin with a supply of $3.9 billion, according to The Block's data dashboard. 

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