MakerDAO is voting on a proposal that will bring a traditional bank into its ecosystem for the first time, allowing the bank to borrow against its assets using decentralized finance (DeFi). Currently 83% of voters are in favor of the proposal. Voting ends at 12:00 pm EST on July 7. The proposal involves creating a vault with 100 million Dai (DAI) for Huntingdon Valley Bank (HVB) as part of a new collateral type in the Maker Protocol. This will essentially allow the Maker Protocol to begin issuing real-world loans to borrowers through a fully backed traditional institution by meeting the …

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of key decentralized finance (DeFi) insights, a newsletter crafted to bring you some of the major developments over the last week. This past week, the DeFi ecosystem saw Axie Infinity’s Ronin bridge relaunch with a fully backed 1:1 Ether (ETH) nearly three months after the infamous $600 million hacks. MakerDAO plans to invest $500 million into United States Treasurys and bonds to weather the ongoing bear market. Polkadot (DOT) announced that they would transform their governance model to move towards complete decentralization. While decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are seen as the future of …

In a major win for decentralization, members of MakerDAO, the lending protocol behind the Dai (DAI) stablecoin, have rejected a series of proposals that would have seen the protocol’s governance structure become more centralized. On Monday, the members of MakerDAO showed up to consider three proposals that would have reorganized the leadership of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) into something that more closely resembles a traditional corporation, complete with a board of directors. The proposals were drafted as potential solutions for making the DAO more efficient and more capable of executing “high-level decisions.” Author of one of the proposals and …

MakerDAO is currently voting on a proposal aimed at helping it weather the bear market and utilize untapped reserves by investing 500 million Dai (DAI) stablecoins into a combination of United States treasuries and bonds. Following a straw poll in a governance Signal Request, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) members now must decide whether the dormant DAI should go entirely into short-term treasuries or split 80% into treasuries and 20% into corporate bonds. The Maker Governance votes to determine how to allocate 500 million DAI between different investment strategies. This allocation poll is a result of the passage of MIP65: …

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have become a rage in the ever-expanding crypto ecosystem and are often seen as the future of decentralized corporate governance. DAOs are organizations without a centralized hierarchy and were intended to work in a bottom-up manner so that the community collectively owns and contributes to the decision-making process. However, recent research data suggests that these DAOs are not as decentralized as they were intended to be. A recent report from Chainalysis analyzed the workings of ten major DAO projects and found that on average, less than 1% of all holders have 90% of the voting power. …

MakerDAO has voted to cut off lending platform Aave’s ability to generate Dai for its lending pool without collateral as the risks of Celsius’ liquidity crisis loom large over the entire crypto ecosystem. The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) made the decision as a means of mitigating the Maker protocol’s exposure to the beleaguered staking and lending platform in case Celsius goes belly up and implodes the staked Ether (stETH) peg as well. stETH is a token representing an amount of ETH that is staked on the Lido staking platform. Its peg to Ether (ETH) has been wavering for several weeks, …

The past week in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem saw many new developments, including the rebirth of the Terra 2.0 blockchain. Meanwhile, Binance’s incubation platform Binance Labs launched a $500 million fund to support and promote Web3 adoption. Singapore’s central bank partnered with JP Morgan to explore DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets by establishing tokenized bonds. KuCoin launched its very decentralized wallet with DeFi and nonfungible token support. The top-100 DeFi tokens showed signs of a breakout from a month-long bearish trend, with most of the tokens showing overall gains in the past seven days. Maker founder proposes MetaDAOs …

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 …

Its been a rough couple of weeks for the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin (BTC) price is nowhere near the price estimates of most analysts, multiple stablecoins lost their peg and the demise of one of the top decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms sparked an event that resulted in $900 billion vanishing from the total crypto market capitalization. In the midst of the widespread fallout, MakerDAO (MKR) managed to turn crisis into opportunity and the collapse of TerraUSD (UST) has brought renewed attention to DAI, the longest-running decentralized stablecoin. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that as the collapse of Terra …

For years, cryptocurrency advocates have touted the world-changing capability of digital currency and blockchain technology. Yet with the passing of each market cycle, new projects come and go, and the promised utility of these “real-world use case” projects fails to satisfy. While a majority of tokens promise to solve real-world problems, only a few achieve this, and the others are mere speculative investments. Here’s a look at the three things cryptocurrency investors can actually “do” with their coins. Lending Perhaps the simplest use case offered to cryptocurrency holders is also one of the oldest monetary applications in finance: lending. Ever …

Popular decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap has announced the formation of Uniswap Labs Ventures (ULV), a venture capital fund focused on investing in Web3 companies and projects. The firm will invest at any stage of development into various projects or technologies related to Web3, infrastructure, developer tools, and consumer-facing applications as areas of interest according to the announcement on Monday, April 11. The firm has already invested in 11 companies and Web3 protocols, including decentralized money market Aave, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) behind the DAI stablecoin, MakerDAO, and blockchain bridging protocol LayerZero. In the announcement, Uniswap expressed what it looked …

The community behind decentralized stablecoin platform MakerDAO is mulling over a major tokenomics shift that could replace its governance token, MKR. A proposal was made on the MakerDAO forum by community leader “monet-supply” on March 14, outlining an alternative token economic mechanism. If the proposal passes a full governance vote, the protocol could replace its current governance token, MKR, with a new token called stkMKR. There were many responses to the proposal within just a few hours of it being posted, most of which were positive and regarding the technicalities of the solution. From the proposal and discussion stage, it …