Maker rebrands as SKY, DAI will be upgradeable to USDS

Maker DAO has revealed details of its major rebrand.

As part of its Endgame overhaul, Maker will henceforth be known as Sky, while its decentralized DAI stablecoin and governance token MKR will be known as USDS and SKY respectively.

Users will have the option to upgrade their tokens to USDS and SKY voluntarily from Sept. 18 onwards. Each MKR token can be exchanged for 24,000 SKY tokens.

For users that choose not to upgrade, both DAI and MKR will remain in existence as legacy tokens in the renamed Sky protocol.

Users that choose to upgrade will be able to benefit from core new features like native token rewards, where users holding the USDS stablecoin can earn SKY governance token rewards, accessed via the projects new app sky.money.

These are among the changes envisioned under the Maker Endgame plan, which previously referred to the new tokens by a placeholder — NewGovTokena and NewStable.

The “DAI Savings Rate” (DSR), Maker’s variable interest rate for borrowing DAI that it tweaks according to market conditions, will be renamed as the Sky Savings Rate. Maker DAO recently lowered the DSR from 7% to 6% on Aug. 16.

The Sky Savings Rate will be effectively the same as the DSR, with some slight added improvements of gas efficiency.

New features like native token rewards and the Sky Savings Rate will not be available in all jurisdictions.

The rebrand will retain most of Maker protocol’s existing characteristics, with USDS being backed by the same exact mechanisms as DAI. 

Rune Christensen, co-founder of MakerDAO, said: “Like MakerDAO before it, the Sky Protocol is decentralized, community-governed, permissionless, and non-custodial, with users free to withdraw their funds at any time.”

The overall goal of the rebranding initiative is to render Maker’s governance mechanisms immutable, so it can sustainably grow in a decentralized way, Christensen told Blockworks.

“You can’t ultimately have a single legal entity representing a decentralized system. It’s just not possible.” Christensen said.

Maker SubDAOs, the independent protocol units that Maker relies on to allow innovation at the margins outside of Maker DAO, will be rebranded as “Sky Stars”. 

The first Sky Star to go live will be Spark protocol, a DeFi lending protocol with currently more than $3 billion in TVL.

Spark also recently announced the Spark Tokenization Grand Prix, an initiative to onboard up to $1 billion of real-world assets to the Spark ecosystem.

The Stars, as independent organizations, will also have their own tokens, an idea which bothers Exponential Finance co-founder Mehdi Lebbar.

“While the idea is to decentralize and distribute governance across various SubDAOs, the sheer number of new governance tokens being introduced could lead to a significant dilution of MKR’s value,” Lebbar told Blockworks.

The tokenomics of MKR will get a tweak in addition to the redenomination, which Christensen said would amount to 3% yearly emission, but the Stars are meant to be self-sustaining, he noted, and therefore need their own economic and governance systems.

“The entire objective is to build on top of the track record, the experience, the ability to generate a profit consistently that’s existed and been built up in the Maker protocol for the almost seven years that it has been live, and then use that to create these smaller and more specialized value generating ecosystems,” he said.

Updated Aug. 27, 2024 at 8:27 am ET with additional context.

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