MakerDAO: A decentralized Federal Reserve

This post was originally published on June 21, 2019, and sent to Messari Pro subscribers.

Maker ($MKR) recently released their Dai in numbers report. How’s the team doing in their pursuit to create a credit system outside the purview of central bankers? Pretty good, actually, in spite of some challenges in the first half of the year. The platform’s growth is incredible. Active users have increased exponentially in the past 18 months to nearly 14,000 addresses, and show no signs of slowing down. Some $1.4 billion has been transacted in $DAI in the past month alone.

Even with the explosion of fiat-collateralized stablecoins (GUSD, USDC, PAX, and soon Libra), and the skyrocketing CDP “stability fee” in Q2, Dai continued its upward trajectory as a censorship-resistant, dollar-pegged asset. More experiments are coming online as the Marble team’s experiment in UBI goes live, and more domestic support is on the way as Coinbase rolls out its new Dai offering.

Most importantly, Maker continues to fulfill its core function - enabling credit - at a steadily increasing clip.