BlackRock interested in participating in MakerDAO’s ‘Grand Prix’: report

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is looking to participate in decentralized stablecoin issuer MakerDAO’s “Grand Prix,” a competition aimed at bringing in $1 billion of tokenized assets onto the platform, CoinDesk first reported.

According to a governance forum post for the Spark SubDAO, an independent unit building on MakerDAO, the effort will be focused on investing its reserves in short-duration U.S. Treasury bills and “similar tokenized products.”

Top players in the “real-world asset” space, including BlackRock's BUIDL, Superstate and Ondo Finance, are looking to participate in the effort, according to the CoinDesk report. Spark will reinvest up to $500 million of reserve assets to back the DAI stablecoin into the winners. That capital is currently managed by Andromeda BlockTower and Monetalis Clydesdale, the latter of which recently drew ire from MakerDAO participants for failing to audit its reserves.

MakerDAO, one of the oldest DeFi protocols founded in 2014 by Rune Christensen, has recently been looking to reinvent itself. Under a proposal by Christensen, Maker’s “Endgame” will see the project offer a host of stablecoins and further diversify its backing assets away from ETH and other cryptocurrencies.

Spark is one of the first of what Christensen plans to be many semi-autonomous DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) working on various projects under the Maker banner, focused on building tokenization infrastructure. In short, Christensen views these “subDAOs” as startups that can help increase revenue for the entire organization.

“Spark Protocol is poised to become the central hub for RWAs on Maker and Ethereum, driving innovation and financial inclusion. More details regarding how the competition will work and how proposals will be evaluated will be released in the coming weeks in advance of the application period opening,” the proposal reads.

Applications are open until August 12.