MakerDAO Is Now ‘Sky’ as $7B Crypto Lender Rolls Out New Stablecoin, Governance Token

MakerDAO, one of the oldest and largest decentralized finance (DeFi) lenders, is getting a new name and new tokens as part of its on-going revamp.

Maker has rebranded to “Sky,” according to a press release on Tuesday. The protocol, which has $7 billion of assets, will also introduce new versions of its $5 billion stablecoin (DAI) and governance token (MKR), called the USDS stablecoin and the SKY governance token.

DAI and MKR will stay in circulation unchanged, with the new tokens existing in parallel. Token holders will be able to exchange DAI tokens 1:1 for USDS, while each MKR token can be swapped for 28,000 SKY tokens. The new tokens will be issued on Sept. 18, and holders can voluntarily choose to keep the old tokens or exchange for the new ones.

MKR’s price gained over 4% immediately after the news, and is up 2% over the past 24 hours, outperforming bitcoin (BTC) and the broad-market crypto benchmark CoinDesk 20 index (CD20).

“The fundamental factor was how to grow DeFi to gigantic scale, something as big as Tether or even bigger,” Rune Christensen, MakerDAO’s co-founder, said in an interview with CoinDesk.

Tether issues the $116 billion USDT, the largest stablecoin on the market.

Christensen spearheaded the protocol’s major, multi-year overhaul called the “Endgame.” As part of the process, he first laid out plans of introducing “upgraded” versions of the platform’s stablecoin and governance token in May 2023 in a governance forum post.

Read more: Rune Christensen Explains Why He Wants to Remake Maker and Kill DAI

The protocol is hinging its growth goals on native token rewards for USDS and SKY holders through the protocol’s new user interface, the Sky.money application, Christensen said.

The reward accrual function, however, will be restricted for certain jurisdictions including the U.S. and UK.

The overhaul also includes breaking up the platform into smaller, independent entities with their own tokens. These organizations, earlier referred to as SubDAOs, will be named Stars as part of the rebranding effort.

The first one of these entities is set to be Spark, the lending platform built on top of Maker/Sky.

But the transformation will not happen until “a few months later when the whole experience has been tested and ramped up,” Chistensen said during the interview.

UPDATE (Aug. 27, 13:02 UTC): Adds MKR price gain following the announcement.