Important events
May 122022

Making moves in the chaos
Maker’s native token spikes massively overnight after its rival Terra capitulates.- MKR spiked over 100% on Wednesday despite the mass market selloff led by the collapse of Terra’s UST and LUNA. While the token eventually succumbed to the bloody sell-off, it still outperformed the market by closing the day only 7% down.
- Talk about schadenfreude – Maker is likely to have benefited from the exodus of liquidity from Terra’s ecosystem. Its own stablecoin, DAI, also runs on an algorithmic mechanism, but as of Thursday morning has kept its dollar peg relatively intact.
- DAI has now surpassed UST as the fourth-largest stablecoin by market cap, making it the largest of the algorithmic kind. Terra CEO Do Kwon once proclaimed DAI would “die by his hand”. Well. This is awkward.
Subscribe to Snaps
See the market snapshots that matter and nothing else – sent to your inbox daily. Designed to be read in 20 seconds or less.
Apr 212022

Ethereum’s Stark(net) shortcomings
MakerDAO to bridge with StarkNet as a way to cut its stablecoin DAI’s transaction costs.- Sorry, ETH, but you’re just too damn expensive. By deploying MakerDAO onto StarkNet instead, devs are hoping DAI transaction costs will be lower by ‘ten times’ compared to Ethereum. While ETH transactions take an average of five mins, StarkNet’s ambition is to reduce this to seconds within the next year.
- StarkNet is a layer 2 side-chain on the Ethereum network made by StarkWare. Put simply, it can serve to decongest ETH’s gas fees. Starting April 28, DAI tokens will be able to bridge over to the more cost-effective layer-2 StarkNet network, while later phases of the integration will form bridges between layer-2 networks. So. Many. Bridges.
- MakerDAO’s native token MKR was down 2.5% on Wednesday. Its stablecoin DAI meanwhile comes in at #5 in terms of market cap rn, but it's hoping to compete with USDC to make DAI ‘the stablecoin of choice within the multichain world’ by having an eclectic mix of layer 2 chains on the protocol.

Shubham Dhage / Unsplash
Mar 182022

Getting ready to Maker history
There are major tokenomics talks happening at the headquarters of decentralized stablecoin platform MakerDAO, and investors clearly love the healthy debate.🔍 Key points:
- The MakerDAO community is mulling over a new proposal that could see a shift in its structure and replace its governance token, Maker, with a new staking token called stkMKR.
- The point is to combat the MKR token’s declining prices. The proposed solution is that the stkMKR would act as a staking or bonding token that’s issued to those that have deposited MKR, and the staking fees would be used to buy back MKR and burn it – less token supply means higher price, basically.
- The proposal garnered much excitement, and it’s rubbed off on prices. The MKR token is up over 23% since a community leader posted the suggested restructure to the forum on Monday, hitting their highest levels in over a month but still down over 70% from last year’s ATH.