SKY Token Really Didn’t Do What I Expected, Says MakerDAO’s Rune Christensen

“USDS is great…but you don’t have to mess with the Maker brand,” was the feedback MakerDAO cofounder Rune Christensen received.

The MakerDAO community will soon begin voting on a proposal to revert from Sky back its original brand Maker in a formal governance poll scheduled for Nov. 4.

On Tuesday, Unchained first reported the proposed reversion by MakerDAO cofounder Rune Christensen on the protocol’s governance forum. Christensen suggested creating different roles for Sky and Maker, while recentering the Maker brand and bringing it back into the spotlight. 

In an hour-long X Spaces on Wednesday, Christensen shared more insight into why he was rethinking the rebrand, highlighting community feedback where some users had a clear message: “USDS is great…but you don’t have to mess with the Maker brand.” 

The token migration from MKR to SKY didn’t quite go as planned. There was a notable preference among users to hold onto their MKR tokens rather than switch to the new SKY tokens.

“SKY token really didn’t do what I expected,” said Christensen in the X Spaces call. 

“I thought that if you do a re-denomination and it has a cool ticker… that would appeal to a new group of potential users. And, clearly that didn’t work out at all,” said Christensen.

He also expected the token to be adopted by centralized exchanges (CEX), which didn’t happen and ultimately impacted the performance of SKY. Calling it a “typical DeFi mistake,” he said that he underestimated how important CEXes are for liquidity and adoption.

“The fact that Coingecko or CEXes won’t acknowledge your token is a big tell that the rebrand has failed, but we are still early to redirect the ship,” said one user on the governance forum.

A month into the rebrand and around 8% of MKR tokens have been converted to SKY, according to data from a Dune dashboard compiled by “@seoul.”