Is the V God's sale of MKR an eventual "betrayal" of the mother chain of the leading project?
Original | Odaily
Author | 0xAyA
According to The Data Nerd's monitoring, just yesterday, V God transferred 500 MKR to CoWSwap and sold them for 350 ETH, marking his first sale of MKR in nearly two years.
It is undeniable that MKR continues to perform well in the illiquid secondary market, with a 124% increase since the lowest point on June 10th. Furthermore, the price of the token has not completely deteriorated. Why did V God choose to sell MKR at this time? What is the story behind it?
The choice forced by the endgame
On September 1st, MakerDao founder Rune posted on the forum to discuss the fifth and final phase of the project roadmap codenamed "Endgame". This phase involves completely re-implementing the entire Maker protocol and deploying it on a new chain called NewChain. Once the deployment is completed, MakerDAO will permanently enter the Endgame state, with no further major changes. The core processes and power balance will remain decentralized, self-sustainable, and immutable.
However, it is noteworthy that after "researching all the possibilities," Rune made a "not difficult decision": to trust Solana. Rune listed three reasons for choosing Solana:
First, the technical quality of Solana's codebase is high because it is highly optimized for operating a single, efficient blockchain, which is precisely what NewChain needs. Solana's codebase is well-designed and was built long after a thorough understanding of the bottlenecks and challenges of blockchain, making it highly suitable for addressing Maker's technical debt. Solana already has two clients, which is crucial for flexibility.
The second reason is that Solana's survival after the FTX explosion proves the resilience of the public chain. Despite all the problems and difficulties, the project still has a thriving developer community. This means that it has significant Lindy effect and may exist in the long term, which also means that the cost of development and maintenance will be greatly reduced, and there will always be a high-quality talent pool available for Maker to access and contribute to.
The third reason is that there are already examples of Solana code repositories being forked and adjusted for application chains. The most notable example is the Pyth project, which runs its own Solana version as its backend.
Interestingly, Rune also mentioned Cosmos as an alternative, but he also stated that "Cosmos is not built with efficiency as its core like Solana, which means the cost of maintenance and performance will be higher", while Aptos, Sui, and other public chains are "fundamentally unsuitable".
Reactions from the Community
The second reply on the second floor of Rune's post might represent the thoughts of most bystanders who read this epic article: "Please tell me you're joking..."
In fact, many people left comments below the post to express their attitude. Some asked about the time spent researching this decision and whether there are detailed technical documents to support this choice. More people started debating whether Solana or other chains are suitable for NewChain. One guy directly refuted Rune's views:
"The most important reason for needing NewChain is that it allows the ecosystem to gracefully recover from the most severe governance attacks or technical failures through hard forking."
-"We need to move to a less secure chain to prevent governance attacks (clown emoji)."
"The second reason is that the Solana ecosystem has already proven its resilience."
-"Everything is going to be fine, all the previous downtime truly demonstrated its "paralysis".
"The third reason is that there are already examples of Solana code repositories being forked and adjusted for application chains."
-"There are already examples of aggregated code repositories being forked and adjusted to act as application chains."
"Delete the post, you're a joke."
And V God's reaction to this is even more direct: sell MKR. The monitored on-chain address has become the clearest voice at this moment.
Starting a New Stove with Star Projects
In fact, many celebrity projects have the vision of "setting up their own doors" and starting a separate application chain to solve many problems that they face after the project develops. For example, after Axie Infinity became popular, it chose to build its own game side, Ronin, sacrificing validation nodes to achieve faster transaction speeds, enabling millions of on-chain game interactions. dYdX faced the problem of competing for network resources with many other projects after its ecosystem developed, which is intolerable for on-chain decentralized exchanges. Therefore, it chose to build a new chain on Cosmos to further ensure the speed of protocol liquidation and decentralization.
Rune and MakerDao are not the first to propose building independent application chains. For projects that have gained independent voice and funding after growing, "defecting" from the "mother" has become an unavoidable topic, and it seems that public chains are always at a loss in the face of this situation.
But at least MKR has increased in value for Vitalik Buterin.
