Lending Platform MakerDAO Approves ‘Constitution,’ Moves Forward with ‘Endgame’ Plan

MakerDAO’s community on Monday approved a sweeping set of rules that outlines how the $7 billion lending platform Maker will function and make decisions in the future.

The approved proposals include Maker’s guiding principles called “Constitution,” authored by Maker founder Rune Christensen, and lay a new foundation for the protocol’s governance, development, and investments of its reserves.

Some 76% of voters favored the proposal, according to Maker’s governance site.

Maker is a lending platform that issues the $5.3 billion stablecoin DAI, backing its value with digital assets from borrowers, and increasingly, with real-world assets such as liabilities from traditional financial institutions like banks.

The platform is led by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called MakerDAO that manages the platform through proposals, community discussions and votes. Investors who hold the platform’s governance token maker (MKR) may participate in votes, and their choice is weighted by the amount of tokens they own.

The approval marks a step forward in Maker’s major overhaul called “Endgame,” boosted by the platform’s founder Rune Christensen. The initiative aims to overhaul how MakerDAO functions in its core.

The proposal included breaking up the DAO’s current structure into smaller units called SubDAOs, which are self-governing and self-sustaining entities with their own tokens within the MakerDAO ecosystem.

The plan also aims to boost platform revenues by investing a part of Maker’s more than $7 billion reserves into real-world assets (RWA) and money market funds, and further decentralize the backing of DAI stablecoin to make it more resistant against censorship and sanctions.

The move also restructures DAO’s governance by establishing new groups such as Constitutional Voter Committees (CVCs), Constitutional Delegates (CDs) and Constitutional Conservers (CCs).

The plan faced some pushback from Maker investor a16z in October. PaperImperium, a MakerDAO delegate, called out Maker for curbing delegates discussing Maker publicly under the new rules.

“While there are plenty of imperfections in the Endgame reforms and the constitutional processes, we are better off uniting around the clean slate those reforms provide and working to make the new Maker as dynamic and successful as possible,” delegate platform Frontier Research posted on Maker’s governance forum.

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