MakerDAO co-founder recommends DAI-USD depegging to limit attack surface

Published at: Aug. 28, 2022

In light of the recent discussions around depegging its native token from USD Coin (USDC) amid sanctioning of Tornado Cash, MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen reached out to the community explaining why free-floating DAI may be the only choice for the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

In his blog post, “The Path of Compliance and the Path of Decentralization: Why Maker has no choice but to prepare to free float Dai,” Christensen disclosed miscalculating the risks related to risk-weighted assets (RWA). He stated:

“Physical crackdown against crypto can occur with no advance notice and with no possibility of recovery even for legitimate, innocent users. This violates two core assumption that we used to understand RWA risk, making the authoritarian threat a lot more serious.”

While revealing the protocol’s inability to comply with regulators, Christensen suggested that “we must choose the path of decentralization, as was always the intent and the purpose of Dai.”

He believes that decentralizing Maker would reduce the impact of crackdowns on the overall protocol, adding that "The only choice is then to limit attack surface by reducing RWA exposure to a maximum fixed percentage of the total collateral - this requires free floating away from USD."

It is important to note that over 50% of DAI is currently collateralized by USDC, as evidenced by daistats data.

Related: MakerDAO should ‘seriously consider’ depegging DAI from USD — Founder

Joey Santoro, the founder of the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Fei Protocol recommended revoking participation from Tribe DAO after reimbursing Fuze victims.

Previously, Rari Fuze hacker was offered a $10 million bounty for returning the $80 million worth of assets, but Fei Protocol received no response from the attacker.

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