Maker Foundation Dissolves to Give the Community Full Control Over the Protocol and DAO

Original decentralized finance (DeFi) project Maker has now completely decentralized MakerDAO making the community now responsible for the protocol. It started as a DAO, then changed into a Foundation which was a temporary solution for the development of the popular lending protocol, an end to having a self-governed self-operating DAO, which it has now achieved. This week, Rune Christensen, the CEO of Maker Foundation, announced that the DAO is now fully self-sufficient, and the Foundation will formally dissolve within the next few months. Over the period of the last six years, its stablecoin DAI has grown to become a $5.25 billion market cap crypto-backed stablecoin. In Q2 of 2021, the supply of DAI grew 76%, producing $43 million in earnings, up 136% since 1Q21 and 21,500% year-over-year. While DAI has a 5% market share of the stablecoin market, the lending protocol has $5.45 billion in outstanding debt compared to $6.62 billion on Compound and $6.89 billion on Aave. “MakerDAO continues to provide one of the best demonstrations of profitable growth in DeFi,” noted Ryan Watkins of Messari, adding the project also has a powerful business model having zero infrastructure costs with users paying gas, zero cost of capital with MakerDAO minting DAI, and extremely high margin with very low headcount requirements while having global reach without the hurdle of regional financial regulations. Currently, the project has over $8 billion in assets locked in smart contracts of the Maker Protocol. In terms of total value locked (TVL), the protocol has $5.85 billion comprising 2.43 million ETH, nearly 17k BTC, and 61.36 million DAI.