MakerDAO Votes in Favor of Rune Christensen’s ‘Endgame Plan’

The plan involves restructuring the DAO into smaller teams with one aligned mission

article-image

Blockworks exclusive art by Axel Rangel

share

key takeaways

  • 80% of MakerDAO community members voted in favor of launching the Endgame Plan
  • A proposal to move $1.6 billion worth of USDC from Maker’s reserve into Coinbase Prime has also received the green-light

MakerDAO has voted in favor of moving forward with founder Rune Christensen’s “Endgame Plan” — which aims to make the protocol more decentralized.

As one of the largest DeFi protocols, MakerDAO has had to navigate complicated internal political and structural disagreements. The Endgame Plan was designed by Christensen in the hopes of improving protocol governance mechanisms. 

In early October, Christensen submitted a set of Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs) to set the ground rules that would enable the launch of the Endgame Plan

The plan proposes a new structure for the DAO to better align incentives between the different community members —  including the DAO workforce, MKR holders, governance delegates, holders of the DAI stablecoin and Maker vault owners — by restructuring the DAO into smaller teams with one aligned mission.

These smaller teams, dubbed MetaDAOs, will each have its own governing token — they will have a specialized purpose that is aligned with the protocol at large but will be its own fully functional decentralized governance. 

In an interview with Blockworks, Lucas Vogelsang, MakerDAO community member and founder of Centrifuge — a protocol bridging real-world assets to DeFi — said the Endgame Plan will be a huge experiment for MakerDAO to figure out exactly how it can run a fintech-startup in a fully on-chain and transparent way.

“If you want to do something different, it’s not going to be building the same structures that we already have — we have to experiment a bit, and that’s what we’re doing with MakerDAO,” Vogelsang added. “We’ll see how it works in six months from now and re-evaluate.”

Another proposal which received a green light from the MakerDAO community today is moving $1.6 billion worth of USDC from Maker’s reserve into Coinbase Prime, the centralized crypto exchange’s institutional investment arm, that will allow the protocol to earn a 1.5% yield on its assets.

In a community forum, the London Business School Blockchain Society, which supported the proposal, noted that the “1.5% yield is an attractive way to bring immediate income to Maker.” 

“That said, this proposal is likely to create lock-in to holding USDC because of the revenue stream it creates, which runs contrary to the intention to decentralise our stablecoin holdings,” the group added. “We need to actively source other revenue opportunities to relieve this exposure.”

DAI is one of the largest stablecoins by market capitalization, with over $7.6 billion in circulation. Its price is pegged to the US dollar through a module known as the Price Stability Peg (PSG), which allows users to swap collateral for DAI at a fixed rate. 

Currently, USDC makes up about 39% of DAI’s backing, but following the US Treasury’s decision to sanction crypto mixer Tornado Cash, MakerDAO has been looking at alternative ways to back the protocol’s crypto treasury.

It’s, as such, unsurprising that the community has also voted in favor of transferring $500 million worth of USDC to hedge fund Appaloosa and crypto broker Monetails. The USDC will be loaned to centralized exchange Coinbase, collateralized by bitcoin and ether.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

  • Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
  • Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
  • Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
  • 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
  • Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
  • The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
  • Supply Shock: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.
Tags

Upcoming Events

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

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

morpho 2 graphic.png

Research

Utilizing a ‘DeFi Mullet’ approach, Coinbase’s Bitcoin-backed loans integration with Morpho demonstrates a powerful blueprint for CEXs to monetize dormant assets by expanding adoption of wrapped products (cbBTC, USDC) while also supporting native and/or preferred DeFi ecosystems (Base) which can further lead to downstream growth in onchain liquidity and increased utilization of the related assets.

article-image

Documents and sources suggest Neon Machine is running out of cash and has laid off nearly all its employees — and struck a deal with the Chinese government to stay afloat

article-image

The network is at a “pivotal juncture,” Blockworks Research’s Marc-Thomas Arjoon said

article-image

Altcoin trade volume has returned to pre-FTX levels, but with a shrinking pool of market leaders

article-image

Solana Foundation’s former head of strategy proposes increasing the disinflation rate

article-image

With much of the bitcoin mining supply chain based in Asia, US-based operations now face higher equipment prices

article-image

Anticipating an economic downturn, venture firms may be less likely to invest