Vitalik Offloads MKR After MakerDAO Founder Pitches Solana Fork

Tensions are flaringbetween MakerDAO and the broader Ethereum community after the founder of DeFi’s largest collateralized debt protocol proposed forking Solana for the project’s future appchain migration.

Maker’s MKR governance token dipped 5.6% from yesterday’s high after Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, sold his stake of 500 MKR for 353 ETH ($580,000), apparently in response to the news.

Buterin later made an appearance in the Discord server for Reflexer, which develops RAI, a purely ETH-backed and unpegged competitor to MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin. He called for Reflexer to embrace minority liquid staking tokens (LSTs) to expand its share of Ethereum’s stablecoin sector amid Maker’s planned exit from the network.

With MakerDAO “torpedoing itself in weird directions,” Buterin said it makes sense for RAI to take on a more “activist” approach to governance and support non-dominant forms of staked ETH. Lido currently controls nearly three-quarters of the liquid staking market, and its dominant position has raised centralization fears.

On Sept. 1, Rune Christensen, the controversial co-founder of MakerDAO, published his thesis for why MakerDAO should launch its future appchain deployment on a fork of the Solana codebase.

Christensen cited Solana’s scalability, multiple clients for security, and the established precedent of projects launching Solana forks as dedicated appchains among the reasons informing his decision. He added that the Solana ecosystem has “proven its resilience” after the collapse of FTX — a prominent Solana investor.

Christensen added that Cosmos is also a suitable contender but does not offer the same efficiency as Solana.

Endgame

In May, Christensen first outlined plans for an appchain migration to be the final stage of Maker’s ongoing “Endgame” overhaul. The move would launch a new network dedicated to hosting MakerDAO and would follow significant changes including to the MKR and DAI tokens, reorganizing into a series of specialized subDAOs, and revamping its governance processes.

“NewChain…allows the system to deal with the 8 years of technical debt in the protocol, and means all components of the protocol can be purposefully rebuilt for their exact role in the final, permanent Endgame technical design,” Christensen said.

Christensen estimates the appchain launch won’t take place until at least three years from now.

Appchains Gain Popularity

The plan comes as appchains are emerging as a popular option for hosting applications that require fast, cheap transactions or high throughput.

Last week, the dYdX community formalized plans to migrate from Ethereum to a Cosmos-based Layer 1. Lens, the decentralized social media protocol from Aave, uses Momoka, a Layer 3 appchain secured by Ethereum.