The winds of blockchain dynamics are blowing, and alliances are shifting as evidenced by a recent financial move. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), has offloaded his remaining stake in MakerDAO tokens. The action followed a blog post by MakerDAO’s co-founder, Rune Christensen, announcing plans to reimplement the project on a new blockchain, cheekily named NewChain.
Interestingly enough, the co-founder showered praise on the Solana blockchain, piquing Buterin’s response. Buterin traded his 500 MKR tokens on CoW Protocol for 353 ETH, amounting to nearly $580,000.
The decision to potentially fork from Solana is not made lightly, and Christensen provided three guiding reasons. He lauded the technical standards and efficiency of Solana’s codebase, a Rust-based codebase planning to detach from its current Solidity-based Ethereum platform. The NewChain project aims to alleviate MakerDAO’s technical debt, claiming compatibility with Solana’s latecomer advantage. Built after the hurdles of blockchains became apparent, Solana has been engineered to avoid such challenges, making it a viable option for NewChain.
Secondly, Christensen spoke glowingly of Solana’s resilience and problem-solving capabilities, including the recent FTX fallout. He stated that its ecosystem offers cost-effective opportunities and top-tier talent that could support NewChain’s development. Lastly, the successful forking and adaptation of Solana’s codebase as appchains provide inspiration for MakerDAO’s NewChain project.
While acknowledging the importance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in building user-oriented applications, Christensen hinted that it may not meet the specific needs of MakerDAO’s backend. NewChain would handle the project’s SubDAO tokenomics and governance security, while Maker MKR tokens and Dai stablecoin would remain functionally tied to the Ethereum network.
In monetary terms, Buterin originally purchased 1071 MKR tokens in 2018 at a price of $905 each. By selling at the current rate of $1,130, his profit margin is an impressive 27%. A portion of these gains, however, were generously donated; back in 2021, he gifted 100 MKR tokens to India’s Covid relief fund.
Buterin also dabbled with other assets, transferring about $1 million worth of ETH to Coinbase recently, repaid 251,000 Rai Reflex tokens on Maker, and liquidated 1,000 ETH, estimated at $1.6 million. These maneuvers were carried out amidst a market downturn, and they certainly caught the watchful eyes of crypto observers worldwide.
Source: Cryptonews
