Although MakerDAO’s dai (DAI) might be the most successful decentralized stablecoin, last year founder Rune Christensen worried the project was teetering on the edge of collapse. So he set about coming up with a rescue plan. Christensen’s proposal, now known as Endgame, is a massive expansion of the Maker project, which would see the release of new stablecoins, new ways to generate revenue and potentially limitless new business prospects through the creation of “subDAOs.” CoinDesk sat down with Christensen for a wide-ranging interview to get a better sense of what’s coming down the pike as Endgame begins to roll out as early as this summer. We connected on May 17, the day Maker announced the coming release of two fully decentralized stablecoins, NewStable and PureDAI, which will eventually replace DAI, which has a market cap of over $5 billion. What are MakerDAO's core values? When Maker started it was during a time when all these early experiments and random ideas, which were mostly pointless [were floating around]. We wanted to try to build something useful to people with this technology. We're really lucky that we had that perspective because it brought us to build a stablecoin, which, at the time, was kind of a boring idea that nobody wanted to do. All that other stuff was cool, but you couldn’t use it unless there's something stable. It turns out that a stablecoin is actually the most powerful business model; it's basically been the product that has taken off and come out of blockchain technology that has actually impacted people. Big time, right? Ultimately, the reason why we’re in the game now, the reason why we are basically making a lot of major changes is we're basically trying to rethink from first principles. How to really build something useful that's going to benefit people that also benefits from all the things you can do with decentralization. Do you feel like you have a good sense of where Endgame will end up? So the real basic concept of Endgame is really growth and resilience – that’s the overall goal. It has to be something that can grow exponentially, and as it grows it gets more and more resilient. The core idea of Endgame is to reach an end state of the system, so it doesn't have to change anymore to the extent that’s possible. That kind of taps into the original Bitcoin values, this principle that decentralization is good, resilience is good, reliability is good. But to give people what they want, you have to be able to adapt to the market. So that's where subDAOs come into the picture; you enable the core of the system to reach this end state and become immutable. … That then allows for subDAOs to take care of all the complexity, adaptation and innovation that can attract new users. That's basically where the whole journey begins. We have to see what actually works in practice before we commit to something and follow market cues. It's hard to predict everything in advance and then just build it exactly the way it was predicted. Usually that would not result in something that is actually very useful to people. It's better to sort of figure out what people actually want and then move in that direction with it. Do you ever feel that MakerDAO governance is over-engineered? I believe the problem is that it's undere-ngineered. Funny. The problem is the reason why you can simplify governance. I mean, that's what we did originally, right? We built the technical layer, we built the protocol, and put a simple voting system on it and released it assuming that the free market would take care of it because the community will vote in their own best interests. But unfortunately, what actually happens in DAOs is politics. So the problem is the assumption in any group setting – in any political setting, you could say – is that when somebody makes a proposal or makes an adjustment to a public system they're doing that to benefit the system, right? That's the game theory. … But the real game theory is that people will do whatever is best for them. Everybody wants to vote to give themselves money. If you just have enough honest people, they can see that happening and then shut it down. The problem is you get this additional layer of politics where what happens is people will kind of argue over some proposal that’s supposed to be in the best interest of the whole system. They’ll say “it's so great and I'm so selfless proposing this,” but there will be an underlying motivation. It’s incredibly difficult to tell when it is genuine. Read the full interview online... –D.K. @danielgkuhn [email protected] | 