Author: Jaleel, Kaori, Joyce, BlockBeats

Editor: Jaleel, BlockBeats

As a leading figure in the cryptocurrency industry, Vitalik's every move is closely watched by the community.

On September 2nd, Vitalik Buterin sold 500 MKR worth approximately $581,000 and exchanged it for 350 ETH. This is the first time Vitalik Buterin has sold MKR in two years.

Vitalik sold MKR. This has sparked a lot of discussion and confusion, especially since MakerDAO is currently the second largest protocol in terms of TVL in all of DeFi. Tron Network founder Justin Sun also asked on social media, "Why did Vitalik give up MKR?"

There are still many people who are as confused as Justin Sun. Some people associate it with a blog post by Rune Christensen, the founder of MakerDAO, who proposed using Solana's codebase to create a new chain, and believe that Vitalik's selling behavior is an action against MakerDAO's "Endgame" plan.

Refuting the Speculation of "Tribalism"?

After the incident escalated, the founder of MakerDao expressed a helpless yet firm attitude, stating that the speculations all came from "tribalists". When announcing the use of Solana codebase as the foundation for NewChain, he responded with "having a more efficient backend means we can provide better DSR on Ethereum".

Regarding the controversy caused by this decision, Solana co-founder Anatoly Toly Yakovenko tweeted twice in an attempt to avoid getting caught up in a dispute. He aimed to set a peaceful and friendly tone for the matter.

Anatoly referred to this as a victory for open-source technology and "really hopes that people in the community don't use this as a stick to attack Ethereum." In comparison to Ethereum, he also showed a friendly attitude towards Solana, stating that "Solana is not built out of thin air, countless things that make @solana special are built on the development of Ethereum."

Vitalik's complex feelings towards Solana

Although Solana competes with Ethereum, Vitalik seems to often "praise" Solana.

One of the most representative examples is when, after FTX's collapse and Solana's heavy blow, Vitalik expressed his encouragement and blessings for Solana by quoting "Some smart people tell me".

"Some smart people told me that Solana has a sincere and intelligent developer community, and now those terrible opportunistic funds have been washed away. This chain has a bright future. It's hard for me to judge from the outside, but I hope the community gets a fair chance to develop." Vitalik said.

Source: TradingView

Also thanks to Vitalik's support and comments, Solana's coin price has been rising steadily from the bottom.

Meanwhile, in July of this year, the US SEC marked Solana's token SOL as an unregistered security. Vitalik commented on this, expressing his sadness, "The comment I want to make is that I am sad to see Solana and other projects being hit like this."

From this, we can also see Vitalik's complex emotions towards Solana.

On the one hand, as a member of the encryption alliance, Vitalik hopes that Solana can return and make more contributions to the encryption industry. It is precisely for this reason that Vitalik once said: "If Ethereum's victory is achieved by being kicked out of exchanges by other blockchains, this is not a glorious way, and in the long run, it may not even be a victory."

On the other hand, with pride in himself, Vitalik seems somewhat disdainful of Solana's attitude.

At the EDCON 2023 conference held in Podgorica, Montenegro, Vitalik appeared on stage wearing traditional Montenegrin clothing and introduced himself as Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, promoting its technology. The Ethereum co-founder joked, "I am Anatoly, I come from Solana, and today I want to tell you why the most scalable blockchain relies on nodes running on powerful servers."

However, Vitalik did not further mention Anatoly or Solana after the introduction. Instead, he covered the poor usability of decentralized technology, insufficient asset security, and social recovery systems, or a kind of mockery of Solana.

With complex feelings towards Solana, Vitalik sold MKR, which was preparing to "escape" from Ethereum and turn to Solana.

"Escape" from Ethereum, MakerDAO is not an exception

Migrating to the Rust-based Solana codebase is significant for MakerDAO, as it has previously been written in Solidity and based on Ethereum. It's not just MakerDAO, the community also recalls several "predecessors" who have "escaped" from Ethereum.

On June 23, 2022, dYdX announced that it will be migrating to the Cosmos ecosystem, setting a precedent for native DeFi applications to leave Ethereum. As early as November 2021, dYdX founder Antonio had publicly questioned Ethereum's scalability on Twitter, indicating that he was already considering moving dYdX to other chains. The tweet revealed his thoughts on the matter.

As for the reason for "escaping" Ethereum, Antonio believes that over the years, Ethereum has lacked technical implementation, while dYdX aims to become a DEX that is "ten times the current scale and can compete with centralized trading platforms in terms of experience".

In the migration announcement, dYdX also mentioned that the team is not satisfied with the current transaction speed of 10 transactions per second and the order/cancellation performance of 1000 times per second, and scaling requires building a centralized off-chain order matching system, which is not in line with dYdX's decentralized trading positioning. Therefore, in V4, dYdX will build a decentralized off-chain order system that balances performance and ideology.

Solidity developer 0xTomoyo analyzed the migration from a technical perspective. Currently, the dYdX order book runs on a centralized server off-chain, with L2 only used for settlement and matching trades. In theory, they could build a memory-based order book on L2, but such a tool does not currently exist. Therefore, dYdX chose to build a new chain on Cosmos, with each validator running a memory-based order book. This further decentralizes the protocol.

Related reading: "dYdX "Escape" Ethereum".

Except for dYdX, Compound officially launched its independent chain network Gateway in March 2021, which also attracted a lot of attention. Gateway, formerly known as Compound Chain, is an independent chain with the goal of becoming a unified Defi hub and achieving cross-chain DeFi. Users can stake assets on Chain A and borrow on Chain B, thereby connecting all assets on different chains and improving the utilization and liquidity of the entire network.

Entrepreneurship is not easy, where will MakerDAO go in the future?

Speaking of Vitalik's recent sale of coins, some people associate it with a blog post published by Rune, the founder of MakerDAO, on Friday, believing that Vitalik's selling behavior is a response to MakerDAO's "Endgame" plan.

In the blog, Rune specifically expressed MakerDAO's long-term plan to re-implement the project, proposing to create a new chain using Solana's codebase. Rune also listed three reasons why he believes Solana's codebase is the "most promising" for NewChain to explore, including the technical quality and optimization of Solana's codebase, the resilience of Solana's ecosystem after the "FTX explosion," and past successful fork examples like Solana, just like the Pyth network.

Rune proposed a possible future where MakerDAO's NewChain will serve as a secure bridge between Ethereum and Solana, "providing beneficial impetus for the network effect of the entire multi-chain economy."

Rune's reason for choosing SOL: "Endgame" plan

This inevitably reminds people of the reason why VC firms such as a16z cleared out their MKR holdings, which is due to their disagreement with the "Endgame" plan.

"Endgame" plan was proposed by Rune in June 2022, which includes four main objectives: establishing complete decentralization of MakerDAO; improving the liquidity of Dai and stabilizing its interest rate; enhancing the sustainability of the protocol and reducing system risks; and improving decentralized governance and DAO operations.

After top venture capital firms such as a16z, Paradigm, and Dragonfly sold and emptied their MKR holdings, MKR was relieved of VC burden, and Rune became more determined in his "Endgame" plan. With the MakerDAO community voting in favor of a proposal aimed at strengthening its functionality and adding new protocols on August 5th, the market's attitude towards DAI seems to be changing. The proposal was executed on August 7th, and according to MakerDAO's Spark Protocol page, DAI's deposit rate (DSR) has now increased to 8%.

Data source: DUNE

This change seems to have greatly helped the revival of DAI. According to the latest data, the total locked value (TVL) of the DAI pool has exceeded $400 million, and the market value of DAI has also surpassed BUSD.

Vitalik's "Three Times Shorting" of MakerDAO

In fact, this is not the first time Vitalik has made "negative comments" about MakerDAO.

During the Reflexer Finance Discord discussion, Vitalik seemed to disagree with MakerDAO's NewChain strategy, believing that it was "self-destructing in a strange direction." "MakerDAO is currently the leader in the stablecoin subdivision of DAO governance with multiple collaterals, while RAI is in the subdivision of "minimal governance native collateral." Since MakerDAO has chosen to explore other directions, RAI can actually enter the subdivision of MakerDAO and be more proactive in governance, supporting more niche ETH collateral tokens," said Vitalik.

Source: Reza.eth, a member of RAI team

Previously, when MakerDAO upgraded from single-collateral Dai to multi-collateral Dai, Vitalik expressed different opinions. He also expressed the view that Maker's governance is too complex and centralized (Vitalik advocates for minimal governance). In addition, this time, when compared with RAI on Reflexer Finance's platform, it is clear that he is not very supportive of MakerDAO's current development path.

However, there is also a portion of the encryption community that supports and is optimistic about MakerDAO. Some KOLs have pointed out that "Maker can certainly stick to the original single-collateral DAI, rather than transitioning to multi-collateral DAI, but this means that DAI will not be able to achieve the current large-scale issuance. At the same time, when DAI is unanchored in 2020, if USDC, a centralized asset, is not added, the Maker project may not exist anymore."

From this we can see that the "Endgame" plan that MakerDAO founder Rune has been persistently pursuing has not gone smoothly in the process of execution. After offending VC such as a16, he decided to create a new chain using Solana's code library, which seems to have also "offended" Vitalik.

The future path, where will MakerDAO go?

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