New collateralized stablecoin, Magic Internet Money (MIM) is challenging MakerDAO, the grandaddy protocol of DeFi. MIM, issued by lending protocol Abracadabra, broke $1B in supply on Oct. 5, placing it seventh overall in terms of stablecoin market cap, according to CoinGecko.  That’s $5.39B behind Maker’s DAI stablecoin supply. So while MIM still has a ways…

Climate change is the unifying challenge of the era and the biggest problem humanity is running out of time to solve — and MakerDAO can help. That’s the case Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, makes in a long essay he released today called “The Case for Clean Money,” where he articulates a vision for…

Market-making deals are usually sorted out in private, but DeFi might be making headway for transparency. Wintermute proposed a market-making deal with MakerDAO on Friday via the MakerDAO governance forum. It requested a loan of 10,000 MKR ($24M) from the DAO in order to provide market-making services for both DAI and MKR, across all kinds…

There’s a meme on crypto Twitter that calls DeFi the “future of France” as a play on the phrase the future of finance. Well, there may be more truth to the meme than many expected. Société Générale, the third-largest bank in France, has proposed to borrow Dai in MakerDAO using bonds it issued on the…

You probably missed it.  It was a deal that didn’t involve a big NFT marketplace or a new decentralized crypto exchange. Yet the vote by members of Opolis, a digital employment cooperative, to launch a DAO is significant. Why? Because it’s the latest instance of venture capitalists’ love affair with decentralized autonomous organizations. It also…

Maker Foundation’s CEO Rune Christensen stepped down this week, leaving a carefully built DAO to run the protocol in his place. The move marks the beginning of a new phase for the lender and arguably for DeFi itself, as the ecosystem’s first dapp transitions into a fully decentralized organization. “Today, the Maker Protocol is self-sustainable…

In the DeFi world, oracles aren’t the seers of Greek myth but handy tools that enable data to flow between blockchains and traditional networks in the form of smart contracts. Now oracles have landed right in the middle of a clash pitting two of the biggest players in the space against one another — Chainlink…

In this week’s episode I speak with Mariano Conti, the former head of smart contracts at MakerDAO. Mariano knows the value of having permissionless and uncensorable currencies first hand —he started earning in Bitcoin in 2014 in Argentina because pesos would instantly lose value and it was hard to get dollars. When he learned about Ethereum…

The Maker Foundation is sending 84K MKR tokens, worth $512M at the time of writing, to its DAO’s Treasury. The move is a major step towards further decentralizing the protocol. MKR holders will now decide via governance how the 84K tokens will be spent. Tokenholder governance will also oversee employees who were previously supported by…

A MakerDAO proposal to accept an ERC-20 token which represents shares in a pool of real estate assets as collateral in the Maker protocol passed yesterday. The use of real-world assets in DeFi is a first and is a major step in bringing the trillions of dollars worth of physical assets into the open finance…