Could Endgame Ease MakerDAO’s Governance Tensions?

“The reality of the situation is that the status quo of maker is untenable,” the DAO’s co-founder said

article-image

Blockworks exclusive art by axel rangel

share

key takeaways

  • Infighting at MakerDAO could compromise MakerDAO’s market dominance
  • “There are political and structural issues in the workforce nobody has ever uncovered before that I have just recently encountered as little as a few weeks ago,” MakerDAO co-founder said

Not long ago MakerDAO’s co-founder shared The Endgame Plan, a roadmap that aims to improve the protocol’s governance mechanisms and tap into DeFi innovation.

But disagreements within MakerDAO community members have inhibited the protocol’s ability to make complicated decisions, leading to voter apathy and poor accountability.

“The reality of the situation is that the status quo of maker is untenable,” Rune Christensen, the co-founder, wrote in MakerDAO’s governance Discord. “MKR is near valueless because of the compounding multidimensional risk.”

Following the Tornado Cash sanctions and Circle’s move to blacklist all USDC in Tornado Cash contracts, members of the MakerDAO community — the single largest holder of the stablecoin USDCcontemplated whether the decentralized autonomous organization could completely move away from its dependency on “seizable” centralized assets. 

But completely shifting away from USDC has its downsides — as free-floating DAI would lose its Price Stability Peg to the US dollar — a measure, Rune said, which would only be taken under an “authoritarian threat.” 

Torn between ideologies of relying on centralized assets and being completely decentralized, Christensen said on Discord, “there are political and structural issues in the workforce nobody has ever uncovered before that I have just recently encountered as little as a few weeks ago.”

“The reality is that almost nobody can just fix it, and those who could, would never waste their time and sanity fighting against the garbage politics of those who want to just create drama or those who have a vested interest in keeping the budgets flowing,” Christensen said.

Despite his disdain for the MakerDAO, Christensen is of the opinion that The Endgame proposal could resolve some of the tensions.

“The Endgame is a solution that understands these issues and deals with them and in doing so delivers sustainable advantages from decentralization and token governance that isn’t just regulatory arbitrage we hope the governments won’t keep up with,” Christensen said. “The only way to really do it is to just show it in action.”

Not all community members of the DAO are convinced. 

Pseudonymous MakerDAO member psychonaut replied to Christensen, saying “Given your MKR weight, nobody who is a key person will admit to disagreeing with you. You are inevitably surrounded by sycophants.”

It seems the only thing that the MakerDAO community has been able to agree upon over the past few weeks is turning toward real-world assets to ensure the value of the DAI would remain stable. 

Most significantly, the protocol partnered with Huntingdon Valley Bank, a community bank in Philadelphia, by offering it 100 million DAI to support the growth of existing businesses and investments.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday