Three uses of a knife…

As the latest Maker executive vote went live on the 29th of November, it contained a surprise for two of Maker’s veteran service providers.

Steakhouse and TechOps DAI and MKR streams were being cut. The teams were not offboarded, nor was there any doubt about the work they delivered. But their budgets were part of MIP113, the governance scope. The were no longer listed as facilitators in that scope, and rightfully so. Their removal as governance facilitators, which was a stopgap way to ensure operational continuity, meant that their payment streams no longer had a basis in ratified governance output.

The teams work is still needed, and MakerDAO is happy to have professionals of that caliber, so their work is going to get funded from the Launch Project budget going forward.

The only wrinkle in the plan, is that Maker is undergoing a governance pause, scheduled for December of every year. This means that the Launch Budget can only be voted on after the pause, leading to a full two months of pause, before a new payment stream can be executed. (Delays, or pauses, compound…)

Apart from these dramatic news, we want to point out the stellar output of BA Labs this month. Specifically their Spark Liquidation Simulator.

As the name suggests, this simulator empowers users to gain insights into potential liquidation scenarios within the Spark protocol. (Quote from the post)

Spark protocol has clearly filled a need in the market and attracted $2bn in supplied tokens since it’s launch, less than a year ago. If all of Maker’s subDAOs perform likewise, the Endgame plan will enter the history books for organizational change.

Please also check out their November 2023 review.

The amount of research that goes int the Smart Burn Engine, especially, is quite astounding.

Speaking of research, for those that want to go down the DeFi rabbithole, this forum discussion is the place to go:

As part of the Endgame, Maker has started to provide MKR/DAI Liquidity to Uniswap v2 pools. Impermanent loss is real, as anyone who ever LP’d over a longer timeframe knows from painful experience. In the thread, Rune prompts research into how to optimise these positions. This is great reading for anyone thinking about LPs and DEXs in general.

Quite interesting is the notion to capture MEV in “private pools”, and this answer by Markus B Koch in specific Balancer V2 pools that Maker could use.

Balancer seems to be the DEX that can do it all, and still doesn’t find nearly the use of Uniswap. First mover advantages and network effects, plus strong innovation are hard to go up against.

DAI supply update

In the middle of what seems to be a “bull market” of sorts, with Bitcoin climbing above $42,000 and Ethereum cracking $2,100, we can see DAI supply trending slightly upward. We would have expected a bit more here, as the appetite for leverage returns. But maybe sentiment has not moved as quickly as prices.

Voting update

Since MakerDAO entered the yearly governance pause, there are no new votes.

The year is slowly coming to a close, AVCs, like KISS AVC are using the time to tighten their scope proposals and this newsletter will have one more edition this year.

Thank you to all the readers! We look forward to serve you next year, too.

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