An insightful interview with the Maker DAO team to speak about stablecoins, Ethereum gas and DeFi, of course.
Why do you use centralized stablecoins to create a decentralized one?
The Maker community chose to include centralized stablecoins in the collateral portfolio with risk parameters reflecting the nature of the collateral by measuring community sentiment through forum polling and executive vote.
Some voices spoke against reliance on centralized coins as an affront to the decentralized nature of the protocol but the others countered that including new sources of liquidity had become a necessity for the protocol.
For more information, please see the Governance and Risk Call from April 23rd, 2020. Discussion regarding wBTC as a collateral type starts at ~22:30.
Fiat, USD if you live in the US, is perceived as less volatile, since products and services in the US are paid for in USD, and those prices in USD remain semi-constant over time. Which means, USD has utility, there is a need for time-stable value (remittances, bounties, etc.). The utility of a decentralized one, with how MakerDAO creates DAI, is that it’s transparent (we know how it’s made, and if the value is backed), without also infringing on potential legal boundaries.
What do you think about bitcoin on the Ethereum network?
Bitcoiners currently do not have a permissionless way to leverage BTC. As soon as ethereum builds out permissionless bridges (like tBTC and renBTC), and they are integrated with DeFi protocols, like MakerDAO, there is an opportunity for a huge flood of value to enter into the ecosystem. Bitcoin is over 30x the size of total volume locked in DeFi. Some of that capital is going to want to play!
Can the governance of DAI ever be totally and completely decentralized?
There’s been a gradual transfer of responsibilities from the Foundation to the MakerDAO community. This is really more about finding ways to organize and collaborate on complex tasks that are typically done in the format of a centralized top down organization. I do believe we will get there and the Foundation will be dissolved at some point.
It is going to take time, but time is on our side. More importantly, we have some awesome community members and Foundation members that are simply outstanding. The strength of this community is unstoppable.
Continue to read the interview with the Maker DAO team on DeFi today here.
