Why did Vitalik sell off MKR? What's the story behind it?

Author: 0xAyA

According to the monitoring of The Data Nerd, just yesterday, Vitalik transferred 500 MKR to CoWSwap and sold it for 350 ETH. This was the first time he sold MKR in the past two years.

It is undeniable that MKR still has outstanding performance in the secondary market that lacks liquidity. It has recorded an increase of 124% since the lowest point on June 10, and the currency price has not completely gone bad. Vitalik chose this What is the reason for selling MKR at this point in time? What's the story behind it?

The choice forced by the final scene

On September 1st, MakerDao founder Rune posted on the forum to discuss the fifth and final phase of the project roadmap code-named "Endgame", which is to completely re-implement the entire Maker protocol and deploy it in a project called "Endgame". On NewChain's new chain, once the deployment is completed, MakerDAO will permanently enter the Endgame state without any further major changes. Its core processes and power balance will always remain decentralized, self-sustainable and unchanged.

However, it is worth pondering that after Rune "studied all the options", he made a "not difficult decision": trust Solana. **Rune listed three reasons for choosing Solana:

One is the technical quality of the Solana codebase, as it is highly optimized for operating a single, efficient blockchain, which is what NewChain needs. The Solana codebase is well designed and was designed long after the bottlenecks and challenges of the blockchain had been fully understood, which is very much in line with NewChain's own goals in addressing Maker's technical debt. Solana also already has two clients, which is critical for resiliency.

Second, the Solana ecosystem has survived the FTX explosion, which 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 a significant Lindy effect and is likely to be around for a long time, and means that the cost of development and maintenance will be greatly reduced, and there will always be a high-quality talent pool for Maker to access and contribute to.

The third reason is that there are already examples of the Solana code base being forked and adjusted into an application chain. Most notably is the Pyth project, which runs its own adaptation of Solana as its backend.

Interestingly, Rune also mentioned Cosmos as an alternative, but he also said that "Cosmos is not built with efficiency in mind like Solana, which means that the cost of maintenance and maintaining performance will be higher", while As for public chains such as Aptos and Sui, they are "not suitable at all".

Reaction within and outside the community

Rune's reply on the second floor of this post may represent the thoughts of most people who eat melons who read this magnificent article: "Please tell me, you are joking..."

In fact, many people left messages at the bottom of the post to express their attitudes. Some people asked about the time it took to study this decision and whether there were detailed technical documents to support this choice. More people began to debate whether Solana or other chains were applicable. On NewChain, another buddy directly refuted Rune’s point of view:

“The most important reason for the need for NewChain is its ability to allow the ecosystem to recover gracefully from the most severe governance attacks or technical failures through hard forks.”

--* Let's move to a less secure chain to prevent governance attacks (clown emoticons). *

"The second reason is that the Solana ecosystem has proven its resilience."

——*Everything is about to get better. All past downtimes have indeed proved its "paralysis". *

"The third reason is that there are already examples of Solana codebases being forked and adjusted as Appchains."

• *Examples already exist of rollup code bases being forked and adapted to act as application chains. *

*Delete the post, you are a joke. *

**Vitalik’s reaction to this was more direct: sell MKR. **The monitored on-chain address has now become the clearest voice.

Star project, start anew

In fact, many star projects have the vision of "standing on their own" and starting a new application chain to solve the many problems faced by the project after its development. For example, after Axie Infinity became popular, it chose to build its own game side Ronin by sacrificing verification nodes. It has achieved faster transfer speeds, making millions of on-chain game interactions possible; dYdX faces the problem of seizing network resources with many other projects after the ecological development, which is intolerable for on-chain contract exchanges , so it chose to build a new chain on Cosmos to further ensure the settlement speed and decentralization of the protocol.

Rune and MakerDao are not the first to propose building their own application chains - for projects that have developed and grown with independent voice and funding, defecting from the "mother body" has become an unavoidable topic. Faced with this The public chain always seems to be the one that is helpless.

But for Vitalik, at least MKR has increased a lot.