The Journey of Rune Christensen and MakerDAO’s Success

• Rune Christensen’s vision led to the creation of MakerDAO and the DAI stablecoin, emphasizing security and stability.
• The “Endgame Plan” aims to fully decentralize MakerDAO, transitioning DAI to a free-floating asset backed by real-world assets.

The story of Rune Christensen starts on a little Danish island. Growing up in Copenhagen, he was a self-described “nerdy kid” intensely hooked on World of Warcraft. His path into the worlds of technology and finance changed dramatically when he learned about Bitcoin while still a University of Copenhagen student.

Christensen had a dramatic change and found in Bitcoin a new goal and a way to question the newly rocked conventional financial system by the worldwide financial crisis.

“I became really into that Bitcoin culture and the belief that we might use technology to solve global problems,” Christensen says.

His first obsession with Bitcoin drove him more into the blockchain rabbit hole, where he eventually became involved with Bitshares, a project aiming at building a distributed exchange and stablecoin. Though Bitshares fell short of expectations, it prepared readers for Christensen’s next major project, MakerDAO.

The Beginning of MakerDAO 

2014 saw Christensen start MakerDAO with co-founder Nikolai Mushegian. The goal was to build a distributed stablecoin using Ethereum’s developing smart contract powers.

Unlike many early blockchain initiatives that hurried to market, Christensen and Mushegyn gave security top priority and delayed product introductions until they were sure their resilience would be strong.

This measured approach paid off, especially when well-publicized hacks claimed early blockchain projects like The DAO fell victim.

Christensen credits MakerDAO’s resiliency in great part to Mushegian’s technical security emphasis. “We were lucky that my co-founder, Nikolai, noted the vulnerability of things like smart contracts to hacking,” Christensen says.

This vision provided a strong basis for the long-term viability of the project and helped MakerDAO avoid the traps that struck many of its contemporaries.

The main offering from MakerDAO, the DAI stablecoin, soon became a mainstay of the DeFi ecosystem. Often regarded for its security and stability, DAI is a distributed stablecoin linked to the US dollar that lets users borrow money by pledging digital assets as collateral.

In the turbulent crypto market, this creative solution not only offered a consistent store of value but also presented people all over the world with new financial prospects.

MakerDAO gets its 8% yield on DAI, according to Christensen, by distributing underlying assets between conventional financial instruments, including treasuries, real estate, and cryptocurrency assets. Through market inefficiencies, this integration of real-world assets into the DeFi space—known as the “base trade”—allows for notable gains.

The Endgame Plan and Future Vision

MakerDAO’s vision goes beyond its present successes, according to Christensen. He put out the “Endgame Plan,” a thorough plan to progressively decentralize MakerDAO and guarantee its viability in mid-2022. Originally collateralized by real-world assets, DAI is meant to be a free-floating asset.

DAI would remain fixed to the dollar over three years, during which the protocol seeks to gather as much Ether (ETH) as feasible to raise its distributed collateral ratio.

This audacious plan captures Christensen’s conviction on the possibilities of distributed stablecoins. Using blockchain transparency and robustness, he sees a time when distributed stablecoins rule the market and surpass their centralized equivalents.

“Deleted stablecoins will be the whole market if the space ends up living up to its potential,” he says.

Though these grand ideas abound, Christensen’s path with MakerDAO has not been without difficulties. MakerDAO’s dispersed form of governance has caused strife and controversy.

Often found in multi-message conversations on Maker’s Discord governance channel, Christensen’s straightforward and unvarnished communication style has occasionally set off discussions inside the community.

Furthermore, raising questions about conflicts of interest are Christensen’s large ownership of MKR tokens and his voting delegation to affiliated members.

Still, Christensen is dedicated to his idea of a totally dispersed MakerDAO. He expects the endgame strategy to provide the required motivation to reach this target, therefore enabling him to give up control and let the community lead.

“Oh, it is just this one next thing, and then that is enough, and then the community can figure it out,” Christensen says, acknowledging that he has made that same error often over the years. Now he thinks it might never be feasible if the community fails to make it work with this last attempt.

Continuing Influence

Even as Christensen negotiates these obstacles, his impact on the DeFi scene is indisputable. The success of MakerDAO has motivated many other initiatives and made DAI a dependable and necessary instrument in the crypto ecosystem.

By creatively combining blockchain technology with conventional finance, Christensen has opened fresh paths for stability and financial inclusivity.

Christensen is dedicated to seeing MakerDAO always innovate and adjust to the evolving DeFi scene. In line with more general patterns in user involvement and digital interaction, he thinks gamifying the protocol could appeal more to younger people.

“We design things like a game, and that is the interface they will use,” he says, underscoring the need to adjust to changing user preferences.