During the last bull market, after a decade in the crypto space, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen had grown disillusioned with the Ponzi schemes, degens and dog tokens.
“I thought it was over for the space at the top of the bull market. I was really convinced that crypto had nothing to offer because all I saw was games,” the tall, somewhat blandly good-looking Dane tells Magazine during an interview in Singapore.
Christensen at Token2049 in Singapore.
“In Maker, we had something real, but we were incapable of organizing ourselves. And what happened was a bunch of politics, basically. Basically, I decided to give it one last shot.”
He had a good base to work from for his last roll of the dice. Backed by billions in U.S. Treasurys and on-chain assets, Maker is now raking in almost one-quarter of a billion dollars of revenue annually. Yet it has a price-to-earnings ratio of just 16, far below the Nasdaq average of 30.
There is a good reason Maker is so undervalued — it’s boring and complicated. Christensen set out to change all that by shepherding his controversial Endgame overhaul through the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
Endgame is nothing if not interesting. But it’s still extremely complicated, to the point that Reserve co-founder Nevin Freeman spent the first hour of a recent podcast trying to sum up Endgame before he even introduced his five-hour-long interview with Christensen.
Solidly around $240M annualized revenues, @MakerDAO is now shifting back from getting most revenues from RWA towards getting most revenues from crypto-backed loans.
This is the dual engine people should seek max(crypto yield, tradfi yield).
Soon on @MorphoLabs pic.twitter.com/DFBJMRGQ62
— Sébastien Derivaux (@SebVentures) January 2, 2024
What is Maker’s Endgame? Explain it like I’m five
TL;DR: It’s a five-phase plan that involves hiring an external marketing firm to rebrand the entire operation into something that seems cool and fun. Six new subDAOs will tilt…
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