Tensions have escalated between MakerDAO and the broader Ethereum community following the recent proposal by Rune Christensen, co-founder of MakerDAO, to fork the Solana codebase for its future appchain deployment. This development has led to a 5.6% decline in MKR, MakerDAO's governance token, on Tuesday. The dip came after Ethereum's founder, Vitalik Buterin, sold his stake of 500 MKR for 353 ETH ($580,000) in response to the news.
Buterin later appeared on the Discord server for Reflexer, a platform developing RAI - a purely ETH-backed competitor to MakerDAO's DAI stablecoin. He urged Reflexer to embrace minority liquid staking tokens (LSTs) as a strategy to expand its share of Ethereum's stablecoin sector amid MakerDAO's planned departure from the network. Currently, Lido controls nearly three-quarters of the liquid staking market.
Christensen published his thesis on September 1, outlining why MakerDAO should launch its future appchain deployment on a fork of the Solana codebase. He emphasized Solana's scalability, multiple clients for security, and the established precedent of projects launching Solana forks as dedicated appchains as reasons informing his decision. Despite acknowledging Cosmos as a viable contender, he noted it does not offer the same efficiency as Solana.
Earlier in May, Christensen had first mooted plans for an appchain migration as the final stage of Maker’s ongoing "Endgame" overhaul. The process would involve launching a new network dedicated to hosting MakerDAO and implementing significant changes including to the MKR and DAI tokens. This would also entail reorganizing into a series of specialized subDAOs and revamping its governance processes.
Christensen referred to this process as "NewChain," which he believes could handle eight years of technical debt in the protocol. This would enable all components of the protocol to be purposefully rebuilt for their exact role in the final Endgame technical design. However, he estimates that the appchain launch won't take place until at least three years from now.
The proposal comes at a time when appchains are gaining popularity for hosting applications that require fast, cheap transactions or high throughput. Recently, dYdX community formalized plans to migrate from Ethereum to a Cosmos-based Layer 1. Similarly, Lens, a decentralized social media protocol from Aave, uses Momoka - a Layer 3 appchain secured by Ethereum.
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