To make the protocol more decentralized, MakerDAO voted in favor of the founder Rune Christensen’s “Endgame Plan”. This is an effort to make the protocol more decentralized. MakerDAO, as one of the largest DeFi protocols, has faced complicated internal political and structural disagreements.
Christensen designed the Endgame Plan to improve the protocol’s governance mechanisms. He submitted a set of Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs) in early October to establish the ground rules that would enable the launch of the Endgame Plan. It asserts a new structure for the DAO to better align incentives between the different community members, including the DAO workforce, MKR holders, governance delegates, holders of the DAI stablecoin, and Maker vault owners, by reforming the DAO into smaller teams with one aligned mission. Called MetaDAOs, each smaller team will have its own governing token, and each will have a specialized purpose that is in line with the protocol. But it will be its own fully functional decentralized governance.
Lucas Vogelsang, MakerDAO community member and founder of Centrifuge, believes the Endgame will be a huge experiment for MakerDAO to determine how it can run a fintech startup in a fully on-chain and transparent way. He said it’s not going to be building the same structures that there already are. The platform has to experiment and that’s what’s happening with MakerDAO. Moreover, MakerDAO also gave the go-ahead to move $1.6 billion worth of USDC from Maker’s reserve into Coinbase Prime to allow the protocol to earn a 1.5% yield on its assets. The 1.5% is regarded as “good” to bring immediate income to Maker.
The London Business School Blockchain Society said the proposal will likely create a lock-in to holding USDC. This is because of the revenue stream it creates which runs opposite to the intention to decentralize the stablecoin holdings.
