Maker Foundation to Transfer Governance to its Community; Create A Self-Sustaining MakerDAO

A recent tweet by MakerDAO’s founder, Rune Christensen, highlighted that they will make three major operational changes:

“The 3 pillars of a self-sustaining MakerDAO:
— Elected Paid Contributors: experts hired directly by the protocol
— Maker Improvement Proposals: formalized processes for decisions and operations
— Vote Delegates: an ecosystem of “protocol politicians that makes MKR voting easier”

This new approach will give MakerDAO’s community more control over the network given the most recent liability which amounted to a 5.3 million DAI tokens deficit. The loss has since been attributed to crypto arbitrage in the upcoming DeFi space; a situation that has forced MakerDAO to evaluate its risk management approach.

According to Christensen, risk diversification to the MakerDao community would accelerate the firm’s intention to dissolve within the next two years. With the new proposed framework, MakerDAO is optimistic that it will have consolidated on the transfer of knowledge and governance design before it fully dissolves.

MakerDAO’s Proposed Community Governance

As mentioned earlier, the MakerDAO project intends to transfer its functions to the platform’s community. This will be rolled out through stakeholders such as the Elected Paid Contributors (EPCs) whose main obligation is to act as ‘public servants’ within this network. Ideally, they will be tasked with specific ecosystem functions such as security maintenance, legal research, human resources, and risk management.

Elected Paid Contributors:

It is also notable that EPCs will be elected and paid based on a protocol within MakerDAO’s network. Given the technicalities involved, Christensen noted that MakerDAO will prioritize knowledge transfer to the EPCs as the platform’s governance is gradually dissolved.

Maker Improvement Proposals:

The second initiative will be Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs); MakerDAO is set to release 13 of them in the upcoming draft. These developments are set to bring order to the platform’s short-term operations as they will focus on MakerDAO’s daily governance process. Christensen, however, said that the initiative will have to be formally approved by the community in order to roll out. The MakerDAO founder added that political wars within the network are inevitable given this new proposal;

“If Maker becomes a global actor, it is unavoidable that there will be a lot of political proxy wars of public figures fighting against each other for influence,” he added, “That dynamic is always gonna happen. We just need a system that is resilient enough to deal with these non-optimal behaviors.”

Vote Delegates:

MakerDAO’s final proposition is a delegate ecosystem where the voters act like politicians. Basically, these players will be delegated to make decisions on behalf of MakerDAO network participants who have staked their MKR tokens with them. These players can be self-identified or chosen by voters and will play a significant oversight role in this initiative;

“Vote delegates serve as a bridge between voting and public discussion, ultimately bringing governance to a healthy state where decisions are made based on publicly available reasoning,” he said in the presentation.