MakerDAO Content Team "Fired": Why Did MKR Holders Make This Decision?

Decrypt

Read this article in 13 Minutes

The MakerDAO community has "disbanded" their "Content Production Core Unit" with a slim majority.

Original title: "How MakerDAO's Content Team Was Fired by MKR Holders"

Original source: decrypt

Original compilation: Odaily Planet Daily

Content overview

In 2021, MakerDAO will transition to a decentralized governance model, which means that the Maker protocol is now completely controlled by Governance by those with MKR tokens. Shortly after the transition, in December last year, MKR token holders launched a proposal to “fire” the MakerDAO content team. The result is obvious, and the MKR community has won.

The MakerDAO content team was fired

MakerDAO is a smart contract system on Ethereum that provides The first decentralized stablecoin Dai (Ether USD) and derivative financial products. Dai is issued as a guarantee of full collateralization of assets on the chain and maintains a 1:1 anchor with the U.S. dollar. Individuals and businesses can obtain hedging assets and liquidity without centralization risks by exchanging Dai or mortgage Dai.

In July 2021, MakerDAO made a historic decision that the agreement will no longer be governed by the Maker Foundation and guide funds, but It is handed over to all MKR token holders. At the time, Maker Foundation CEO Rune Christensen wrote in a blog post:

“MakerDAO is now fully decentralized.”

Subsequently, Rune Christensen announced the dissolution of the foundation organization it founded.

Now, let's move forward 6 months.

Actually, during this period of time, the members of the MakerDAO organization very much hoped that the project could "take it to the next level", but it seems that the effect is not what they expected Big gap. So after a slightly controversial discussion this week, MakerDAO narrowly voted to “fire” their content team—the Content Production Core Unit, the so-called “content production core department.”

In December 2021, the MakerDAO community initiated a proposal, in which community member Deimos believed that the MakerDAO team neither quickly responded to market changes to produce content, nor provided High-quality work, Deimos also suggested promoting the MakerDAO community meme to have a greater impact, he explained:

“So far, the MakerDAO content team has produced a total of two humble original videos , one on Wormhole, one on how to vote. The others are basically Governance and Risk meeting content remixed and renamed in different styles (7)."

In the end, the MakerDAO community agreed to dismiss the content team with a vote of "49.1% in favor vs. 47.3% against", which means that the team will not receive financial support from the MakerDAO treasury in the future.

Dissatisfied? But the facts speak louder than words

Frankly speaking, before the closure of the Maker Foundation, the content team under the agreement did not provide much support to the project, and in the market There is no big lead either. Seth Goldfarb is the head of the content team at Maker Foundation, and previously worked as a freelancer in the MakerDAO community for nearly a year before turning full-time in May 2021 as the "content production core department" coordinator.

Seth Goldfarb seems a little dissatisfied with such a voting result.

In fact, during the voting process, Seth Goldfarb stated that he was never employed by the Maker Foundation before turning full-time, explaining:

“We participated in several conference calls coordinated by former MakerDAO product manager and project lead Tim Black in an attempt to communicate with the Maker Foundation-owned MarComms team, but due to legal restrictions, They can't share anything substantive at all."

It is reported that some people in the Maker Foundation pointed out that their original intention was to have the content team with a senior Working with a marketing team made up of more than 100,000 people, this wish didn't materialize, resulting in a lot of work and burden on the content team.

Tim Black actually takes some responsibility himself, but he believes that because the Maker Foundation wants to "decentralize" and promote decentralized governance, the so-called "content The "production core department" was set up from the beginning to have problems. Indeed, although Tim Black's statement is a bit confusing, during the transition from the Maker Foundation to decentralized governance, some employees did remain in the MakerDAO project in new roles, while some community members joined the "full-time staff" " ranks.

On the other hand, Tim Black believes that MakerDAO's content department needs to work hard to increase its popularity, and he also urged community members to give more to "a team that worked from the ground up." Much support. Tim Black said -

Who in the community can say that they have given actionable feedback to the content team?

In the community, who dares to say that they have seriously subscribed to the content released by the content team?

In the community, who dares to share the "crazy idea" of the content team?

Seth Goldfarb does not think he owes MakerDAO, "I am proud of the work the content team has done, and the way we have handled this situation," he said Say so.

MakerDAO is the original DeFi lending protocol to fame on the Ethereum network, which runs on the dollar-pegged stablecoin DAI. In order to obtain a DAI-based DeFi loan, users need to deposit ETH or other cryptocurrencies as collateral into the smart contract. Although the MakerDAO smart contract does the heavy lifting, the protocol itself still needs to handle a lot of day-to-day governance, such as:

What assets can be used as collateral?

Should interest rates rise or fall?

But right now, it's all up to those who own the protocol's MKR governance token.

MKR is itself an investment asset, and the Maker Protocol buys and burns MKR tokens to add deflationary pressure.

Is the vote to dismiss the content team a community expression of dissatisfaction with the project?

Although the performance of the MakerDAO content team is not satisfactory, we can see from the whole thing that running a DeFi protocol and related cryptocurrencies is not It's as easy as it looks. On the other hand, the voting results of "49.1% in favor vs. 47.3% against" can also be seen that there is not much difference in the number of community members who are in favor of removing the MakerDAO content team and those who oppose the removal of the MakerDAO content team.

Many people believe that the result of this vote actually reflects that the community is very dissatisfied with the current status of the Maker protocol in the DeFi field.

In May 2021, the price of MKR soared above $6,000 and hit an all-time high. But now, according to CoinMarketCap, MKR has fallen into the $1,700 range, which represents a drop of up to 73%. In comparison, ETH is down just 27% over the same period. Although MKR’s market value (less than $10 billion) is still the top five DeFi tokens, it has already been surpassed by other competitors (such as Terra’s market value has risen to $24 billion).

It's not that simple for the community to

The performance of the stablecoin DAI also seems to make the community feel Dissatisfied, although the transaction volume of DAI is comparable to Terra's decentralized stablecoin, it is still much inferior to other centralized stablecoin competitors (such as USDC and BUSD)-not to mention the "big boss" of stablecoins Tethered.

Of course, we’re not blaming MakerDAO — data doesn’t lie, after all.

According to Coingecko data, in 2021, the market value of DAI has increased from US$1.59 billion in the previous year to US$9.25 billion, and its market dominance has also increased from 4.7% to 5.5%. But equally, Terra, which was barely a competitor to DAI a year ago, now surpasses DAI in terms of both market capitalization and market dominance.

Frankly speaking, the biggest contradiction of MakerDAO seems to be that the governance community cannot determine clear performance indicators and strategic direction. Community member Deimos bluntly said: "They don't judge what strategy What works, what doesn’t.” However, MakerDAO didn’t seem to recognize its own situation, and its co-founder Rune Christensen even began to “spout” competitors, claiming that Terra’s ecological stablecoin UST and abracadabra’s ecological stablecoin MIM are Ponzi schemes (solid ponzis) and pointed out that these two digital assets are not built for "resilience" and thus will become victims of abnormal market volatility, and the bear market will eventually cause UST and MIM prices to return to zero.

But in terms of the current situation, who do you think has the bigger problem? Perhaps the answer is already obvious.