MakerDAO Founder Says Having “Rando’s” Participate in Governance Makes DAOs Unpredictable

Imagine a world where the co-founder of one of the largest decentralized autonomous organizations says it’s actually not that great to have community members participate in the governance of said DAO.

Imagine no longer.

MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen said, “having ‘rando’s’ making decisions,” is as unpredictable as having a centralized group control governance. He added that, “it’s not important who or how a decision is made,” but “what decision is made.”

Christensen made the statement in an X Space hosted by Ethena Labs, responding to Marc Zeller, founder of the Aavechan Initiative. Zeller had confronted Christensen by saying, “there’s no discussion anymore,” referring to MakerDAO governance.

Zeller said it’s concerning that the upper echelons of the DAO are making all the decisions, which in turn, “make it hard to predict.”

Christensen did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Defiant.

Christensen, Zeller and others were on a panel discussing MakerDAO’s decision to add Ethena’s USDe as collateral for DAI. The move pushed Zeller to propose that Aave should drop DAI as collateral on its lending protocol –after discussion, the Aave community decided to reduce but not eliminate DAI collateral.

Nostra Finance also announced on April 2 it would be suspending new DAI lending on its platform, citing concerns that MakerDAO is taking on excessive risk with USDe.

Ethena’s USDe maintains its $1 peg by holding staked ETH issued by Lido, and taking short positions to hedge against the volatility of that stETH. It passes on the yield of stETH and short positions on to holders and uses centralized custodians and centralized exchanges for its operation.

What’s a DAO For Then?

Christensen’s comments open the doors for questions, considering the nature of DAOs.

A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization governed by token holders, whose weight in governance decisions usually corresponds to how many DAO tokens they have.

It allows a distributed group of people to coordinate and, ideally, reach decisions guided by community consensus in a transparent way.

But if only a small subset of people make decisions internally, in the same way a traditional corporation does –which is what Zeller alleges is happening in MakerDAO– then what’s a DAO for?

Later in the discussion, Christensen said that MakerDAO needs to make “bold moves” in order to make the organization much more effective.

From Christensen’s recent statement, it seems that some of the original DAO idealism might be compromised to reach that efficiency.