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…

MakerDAO will soon launch a feature which may solve the biggest UX hangup of the Optimistic layer 2 (L2) scaling solution. The feature will allow users to move not only DAI, but eventually any Ethereum asset, off Optimism and to layer 1 (L1) within minutes. Considering the previous withdrawal wait period of one week, the…

MakerDAO is exactly what it sounds like –it’s a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization and its purpose is to make DAI. DAI is a digital dollar backed by locked up cryptoassets like ETH, BAT, WBTC, KNC, and more. What Maker figured out years ahead of the explosive rise of DeFi is that a stablecoin could…

DeFi’s central bank is piling on fees. MakerDAO backend and oracles engineer Nik Kunkel tweeted that if the current market conditions remain stable, the protocol would generate ~$71M in annual stability fees. Stability fees paid by Maker borrowers (similar to borrowing costs), are then burned by the protocol, indirectly benefiting MKR holders by reducing the…