Maker founder proposes MetaDAOs and synthetic ETH in ‘Endgame Plan’

Published at: June 3, 2022

Co-founder of MakerDAO Rune Christensen has issued a new monumental proposal to push the project into its final form called The Endgame Plan.

Across 3,000 words including 35 detailed infographics, Christensen explained that the current model of governance at Maker creates a deadlock, making it difficult for the protocol to effectively process “complicated real world financial deals” and compromising its competitiveness with financial institutions.

Central to Christensen’s Tuesday plan is the formation of MetaDAOs designed to tackle specific governance issues within the Maker ecosystem and alleviate congestion on the “slow and single threaded decision making process” that exists now. Each MetaDAO can be thought of as a subsection of MakerDAO, which would issue its own token and be governed by Maker participants interested in its particular goal.

Maker is a smart contract lending platform that issues Dai (DAI) stablecoins using Ether (ETH) as collateral. The Maker Foundation previously held responsibility for protocol governance, but the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) took over last year.

Although he feels that Maker’s complexity gives it the ability to pounce on the best opportunities, the use of MetaDAOs would help the protocol focus its abilities into smaller and more manageable parts. He wrote that with de-risked MetaDAOs, “the Maker Core could become a lot simpler than it is today, creating a best of both worlds situation:”

“MetaDAOs also allow Maker to overcome the single threaded nature of the current governance process, and let many separate MetaDAOs prioritize and execute in parallel with almost unlimited potential for scale and autonomy.”

The first MetaDAO Christensen would see formed is M0, a CreatorDAO to seek out opportunities for profit outside of Maker and to take on some of Maker’s excess complexity. M0 would issue MZR governance tokens through a fair launch via yield farming.

Synthetic Ether

Christensen also proposes Maker launches a synthetic ETH token called MATH to take advantage of the Merge and generate more revenue with the lowest possible initial cost:

“The lowest hanging fruit of the Endgame Plan Launch is the acceleration of the existing roadmap milestone to quickly launch a simplified version of Synthetic ETH.”

MATH fees could initially be set to 0% in order to incentivize its use, but eventually, it could generate revenue for the protocol as synths have done for THORChain .

The focus in the plan on revenue-generating products may be due to the fact Maker is running in the red. Core developer at Yearn.finance Banteg tweeted on May 27 that “MakerDAO is in war mode again,” and shared an image from the proposal showing it was no longer profitable.

Rune's back from the vision quest. MakerDAO is in war mode again.https://t.co/XmHeWv0DGO pic.twitter.com/fCHhoKX38M

— banteg (@bantg) June 2, 2022

The crypto community has had mixed reactions to the new proposal. On Friday, Rari Capital CEO Jay Bhavnani called the proposal “unnecessarily complex and over-optimizing for many problems.”

However, Compound Finance founder Robert Leshner tweeted on Friday that he was pumped, saying the plan was “Complex, but in some sense, ‘back to the basics’ of what Maker was intended to make: new synthetic assets.” As of now, only synthetic ETH has been proposed by Christensen.

I'm so pumped for the @MakerDAO Endgame Plan by @RuneKek Complex, but in some sense, "back to the basics" of what Maker was intended to make; new synthetic assets.https://t.co/d57xO1L11t

— Robert Leshner (@rleshner) June 2, 2022