It was a sense of disappointment that pushed Danish entrepreneur Rune Christensen to start his own crypto project. In the years after Bitcoin was created in 2009, he quickly became convinced of the “immense potential of blockchain” but was unimpressed by early projects: Most people were only out to turn a quick buck.
In 2014, Christensen set about trying to build “something useful,” he says, something that “mattered for the real world.” The result was DAI, a stablecoin whose value doesn’t fluctuate from hour to hour like a regular cryptocurrency but instead is pegged to the US dollar, giving people a way to make purchases safely.
To help govern the stablecoin, Christensen and cofounder Nikolai Mushegian (who is recently deceased) established MakerDAO, one of the earliest examples of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)—a new type of entity with no central leadership. Unlike a traditional business, MakerDAO puts every important decision to a community vote, open to anyone who buys a special kind of token called MKR. It’s a niche concept, but there are roughly 6,000 DAOs in operation—and MakerDAO is one of the biggest, worth almost $6 billion at the height of the value of the MKR token.
In the spirit of decentralization—a guiding principle of almost all blockchain-based projects—Christensen says he always planned to step aside once the DAO had become self-sufficient, but when he tried, it was always rudderless in his absence. “I went through this process over and over again,” he says, “always thinking we just needed to get over the next hurdle.” But eventually, Christensen realized that without someone to guide the ship, a power vacuum forms and the community begins to fracture.
In May, after an absence of at least three months, Christensen returned with a radical plan to set MakerDAO once and for all “on a path toward a truly decentralized equilibrium.” Known as Endgame, Christensen says it’s his “last attempt to fix” MakerDAO and a “make or break moment.”
So he asked DAO members to vote for a proposal that will mean existing departments will be disbanded and replaced with “MetaDAOs”—mini-DAOs housed within the MakerDAO mothership—and the project will reconfigure its finances. The goal is to “unbundle bureaucracy” and protect the DAO from forces outside its control, says Christensen, setting the stage for long-term growth.
The vote on the restructuring of MakerDAO took place over two weeks, between October 10 and October 24. The community faced a difficult choice: support the plan of MakerDAO’s enigmatic cofounder, which few really understood, or embrace the imperfections of the status quo. They chose Christensen.
Eric Di Prisco, who previously worked at the Maker Foundation (the entity responsible for kickstarting MakerDAO), goes as far as to say that Christensen is the only person to understand Endgame. “I didn't vote, mainly because I find it incomprehensible and therefore couldn't go so far as to extend my explicit support,” Di Prisco says. “I can't even tell you what a MetaDAO is from a mechanical [or] practical perspective.”
