Founder of Maker

The founder of Maker is Rune Christensen, a Danish entrepreneur and graduate from the University of Copenhagen.

The history of Maker’s ecosystem started in 2014 as Christensen worked on the project through various stages after studying international business and biochemistry and then moving to build a recruitment company Try China before entering the blockchain space.

DAI was launched on the Ethereum network in2 017 after a year of formation of the Maker Foundation which aimed to fuel the growth of the ecosystem and spearheaded efforts to decentralized the development. Christensen serves as the CEO of the foundation while others on the board include President and COO Steven Becker who founded Cubit Capital and also the economist Shafali Roy.

At first, Ethereum was the only asset that could be collateralized through Maker Protocol with Dai being generated known as Single-Collateral Dai or Sai. Back in 2019, the MCD system was implemented so today, any type of an ETH-based asset that was beena pproved by the community of MKR holders can be deposited. The decentralized finance platform allows borrowers to use volatile crypto as collateral for loans of stablecoins that are pegged to the US dollar. The borrower pays interest on the loans but if the crypto collateral drops too low, it is sold to pay off the loan.

Maker got funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain, and Dragonfly Capital. It generated $10 million in interest in 2019 and the platform already attracted more than 400 outside developers. The MakerDAO founders were active in the Bitshares community initially and explored the potential of the DAI forerunner on a platform. But they encountered hurdles and Bitshares lacked the sophistication required for a robust system that will handle dynamic and contentious governance and a heavy focus on proper risk assessment and management.

In the beginning, the members of the community discussed the merits of the few names and one of them was Jiao which meant to “exchange” in Chinese and was chose because it was a form of another Chinese word that was the name of the first-ever paper currency but that was quickly abandoned and then the team chose the word DAI which is short enough to use as a symbol without having to shorten it. Computer engineer Wei Dai invented the concept of crypto and made plenty of contributions to space and it means “to give” in many Slavic languages which is where the founder found its inspiration.