MakerDAO Should Use Solana’s Code to Build Its New Blockchain, Co-Founder Says

MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen said Friday that the platform’s future native blockchain should be built using the codebase that underpins Solana (SOL), a network designed to provide high-speed performance.

In a governance forum post, he said the codebase’s “technical quality,” its “resilience by having gone through the FTX blowup” and already functioning examples make Solana “the most promising codebase to explore further.”

He also mentioned Cosmos as the other “main contender.”

MakerDAO is a largest decentralized finance lender and also the issuer of the $5 billion DAI stablecoin. It is currently undergoing a major, multi-year overhaul called Endgame that includes breaking up the project into smaller, independent entities (SubDAOs) with their own tokens and revamping its governance token MKR and stablecoin DAI.

The plan’s final phase would be the rollout of a bespoke blockchain – under the codename NewChain, for the time being – to connect all SubDAOs and ostensibly make the ecosystem more resilient to governance attacks and technical failures, Christensen explained in the post.

The NewChain is a “major long term project, and will likely take at least 3 years,” he said.

Maker’s endorsement would be a symbolic win for the embattled Solana ecosystem, badly wounded by the collapse of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall, who had been one of the network’s biggest supporters and investors.

“I am honestly speechless,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, posted on X (formerly Twitter) following Christensen’s comments. “The more code reuse we have across all ecosystems the faster everything grows.”

"Rune’s proposal for the future of MakerDAO is a fantastic showcase of how the high-performance technology behind Solana and the Solana Virtual Machine can power the next wave of innovation in this space," Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, told CoinDesk in a statement.

Some community members, however, already pushed back against Christensen’s idea, requesting more information about his research or pitching other solutions.

“Solana and Cosmos are the only options? What about an EVM-based rollup?,” prominent crypto researcher Hasu replied to the forum post.

“If Coinbase can deploy its own chain on a layer 2 (BASE), why not Maker?,” long-time community member Tosh9.0 asked.

Danny Nelson contributed reporting.