Rune Christensen, the co-founder of MakerDAO, said that the DAI stablecoin could drop its peg to the US dollar, removing all the risks of working with USDC. According to daistats, the DAI stablecoin is now 60% backed by USDC (estimated to be worth $3.5 billion).
MakerDAO founder @runkek considers the sale of a portion of DAI’s USDC backing for ETH.
“The sanctions are a lot more serious than I first thought… we should seriously consider preparing to depeg from USD… ‘uprooting’ which is what I call the yolo USDC into ETH approach”
— Blockworks Research (@blockworksres) August 11, 2022
Christensen noted that the US Treasury Department’s sanctions on the Tornado Cash Mixer were the reason for considering this possibility. They turned out to be more serious than initially thought. Following the sanctions, the Center consortium froze USDC funds in tornado Cash wallets.
According to Makerburn, DAI is more than 80% backed by stablecoins, a significant portion of which is USDC. Thus, if MakerDAO sells USDC in favor of ETH, DAI may lose its peg to the dollar due to a violation of the exchange rate module. Christensen believes that this is an acceptable risk and that the MakerDAO community intends to discuss the issue.
Christensen’s comments drew criticism from several well-known crypto personalities. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called it a “risky and a terrible idea,” adding that a significant drop in the ETH spot rate could lead to a drop in DAI collateral valuation.
Robert Leshner, the founder of the DeFi protocol Compound Finance, believes that this move could affect the stability of DAI. According to him, such a move could have implications for the entire DeFi sector.
