Spark Protocol Launches On Gnosis Chain

Spark Protocol, MakerDAO’s first subDAO and a DAI-focussed fork of Aave v3, is now live on Gnosis Chain.

The launch marks Spark’s first deployment beyond the Ethereum mainnet. Gnosis Chain is an Ethereum sidechain supporting Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) execution that offers low-cost transactions akin to a Layer 2 network.

“The first functioning DeFi product developed by a SubDAO has gone multi-chain,” Maker tweeted in celebration of the launch. However, the tweet attracted criticism from the Aave community.

“This is incorrect, Aave team has built the Aave Protocol that MakerDAO forked and calls now SparkLend,” replied Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave. “Credit should go where credit belongs.”

Spark went live in May. The protocol allows users to earn interest on DAI deposits via the DAI Savings Rate and also facilitates decentralized borrowing using DAI as collateral.

In July, the MakerDAO community voted in support of deploying the protocol across multiple different networks. Matter Labs, the team behind the ZkSync Era Layer 2, proposed to host a Spark deployment last month.

Spark currently ranks as the 21st largest DeFi protocol with a total value locked of $465.4M, according to DeFi Llama.