coindesk.com
The MakerDAO community favored keeping the $USDC stablecoin as the primary reserve asset for its $DAI stablecoin, the protocol’s governance site showed on Thursday.
Some 79% of participants backed the decision in a ranked-choice vote, with the rest preferring to diversify the reserves.
MakerDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that manages the lending platform Maker through proposals and votes. Maker 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. $USDC, the $35 billion Circle-issued stablecoin backed by cash and short-term U.S. government bonds, is the most widely used stablecoin in decentralized finance (DeFi). It is also the largest reserve asset in $DAI’s Peg Stability Module (PSM), which contains some $3 billion of the tokens.
The vote follows a turbulent period earlier this month when multiple stablecoins including $DAI and $USDC temporarily lost their price peg on exchanges after Circle’s key reserve banking partner Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.
Read more: Why Stablecoin $USDC’s Unstable Weekend Matters
Thursday’s decision means that Maker reverses emergency measures taken during the stablecoin crisis. The new conditions to mint $DAI tokens through the PSM are closer to the previous parameters, according to the proposal.
Before the vote concluded, some MakerDAO voters expressed concerns about relying too heavily on $USDC.
“Issuer diversification is one of the only immediate risk mitigation strategies MakerDAO can apply quickly in a rapidly deteriorating environment for U.S. regulated issuers and their stablecoin products,” ACREinvest commented early Thursday.