Sky Could Go Back to Being MakerDAO

Maker cofounder Rune Christensen proposed reinstating the Maker brand, using MKR as the DAO’s sole governance token.

Four weeks after one of the biggest rebrands in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), the Maker DAO community will vote on whether the protocol’s new identity ‘Sky’ was the right move.

In a Monday governance post, Maker DAO cofounder Rune Christensen proposed creating different roles for Sky and Maker, while recentering the Maker brand and bringing it back in the spotlight.  

“A number of folks were unclear on the utility of the Sky token, other than the re-denomination of 1MKR to 24,000 SKY, and there have been questions about the introduction of token emissions,” said Christensen.

“Also, using Sky as the name of the protocol, the token and the front end, definitely added some confusion.”

Christensen asked the community to vote for one of three options: to continue with Sky as the core brand, to reintroduce the Maker brand with MKR as the sole governance token of the DAO, or bring Maker back to center stage with a refreshed brand identity that align it with USDS and the StarDAOs.

A community call on Oct. 25 has been scheduled to discuss the feedback and how the final idea will be executed in the weeks to come.

“Once a decision has been made on the direction of the core brand, then the next steps will be to consider if there should be changes made to the tokenomics, and also the next steps with the Sky brand and the SKY token,” said Christensen.

The rebrand to Sky was meant to represent Maker’s complete transformation in its five-phase “Endgame” upgrade. USDS was introduced as an upgraded version of the DAI stablecoin, with SKY replacing MKR as the protocol governance token. 

Sky also introduced “Sky Stars” (formerly SubDAOs), meant to have their own business models, token governance and treasury, while functioning within the Maker ecosystem.

At the time of the rebrand, some industry watchers took issue with a potential freeze function planned for USDS, viewing it as a sign of censorship.

At the time of writing, USDS had $1.12 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL), while DAI had $5.12 billion in TVL.