Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sold 500 MakerDAO (MKR) tokens for 353 ETH (about $579,000 at the time of writing) after Rune Christensen, the project’s head, proposed launching the protocol on Solana.
MakerDAO is the issuer of stablecoin DAI. According to Christensen’s statement, the next phase of the organisation’s development will be the creation of its own blockchain, working under the working name NewChain.
“This will make the ecosystem safer and more efficient. After some research, I concluded that the Solana codebase should be considered as the basis for NewChain,” he explained.
A day after this statement, Buterin visited the Discord channel of the competing stablecoin issuer Reflexer Finance. He offered several pointers on developing the project if ‘MakerDAO torpedoes itself in odd directions’.
Reflexer allows creating stablecoins (RAI) using only Ethereum as collateral. The coin’s price is not pegged to a specific currency, but depends on demand for the asset itself and the price of ETH.
Buterin emphasised the importance of governance when adding the staking feature. He believes that ideally users should begin ‘only from non-dominant services’ — that is, all except Lido Finance.
According to CoinGecko, during the night the price of Reflexer Ungovernance (FLX) rose by almost 70%, to $14.35. At the same time, MKR slipped slightly but quickly recovered to around $1,120.
In May, MakerDAO unveiled a roadmap with a focus on artificial intelligence.
In June the platform increased the amount of US Treasuries in its reserves from $500 million to $1.2 billion. The first step in this direction was taken in October 2022.
Later, the issuer reduced the share of the stablecoin USDC in the total collateral backing for borrowings in DAI.