MakerDAO co-founder proposes fork of Solana codebase for native chain

MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen has submitted a proposal to build the decentralized finance project’s upcoming native chain off a fork of Solana’s codebase, not the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), despite its long-running ties with Ethereum.

MakerDAO’s native chain, dubbed “NewChain,” is part of the fifth and final phase of the MakerDAO “Endgame” upgrade announced in May.

The final phase is expected to take around three years to complete, and it will see the full re-implementation of the Maker protocol into a new stand-alone blockchain.

In a Sept. 1 X (formerly Twitter) post highlighting the proposal, Christensen stated: “After some research, I believe the Solana codebase should be considered as the basis for NewChain.”

The last phase of Endgame is the launch of a native blockchain for Maker with the codename NewChain

It will make the ecosystem more secure and efficient

After some research, I believe the Solana codebase should be considered as the basis for NewChainhttps://t.co/KyGxBBGlVH

— Rune (@RuneKek) September 1, 2023

In the proposal on the MakerDAO forum, Christensen described Solana’s codebase as the “most promising” option to explore, as he offered three key reasons why he thinks it should be used as the foundation for NewChain.

Firstly, he highlighted the “technical quality” of the Solana codebase and argued that it is “highly optimized for the purpose of operating a singular, highly efficient blockchain.”

“The Solana codebase is engineered well and benefits from being designed long after the bottlenecks and challenges of blockchains were already well understood, which fits nicely with the objective of NewChain itself in fixing the technical debt of Maker.”

Secondly, Christensen argued that the Solana ecosystem has “proven its resilience by having gone through the FTX blowup” and several other challenges without crumbling.

Co-founder @RuneKek of @MakerDAO, a DeFi protocol, proposes leveraging the Solana codebase for NewChain following extensive research.

He cites Solana’s technical quality, strong developer ecosystem, and resilience as primary reasons and suggests potential mutual benefits to the… https://t.co/p5w7pGf47h

— Solana (@solana) September 1, 2023

As such, the MakerDAO co-founder suggested that the Solana ecosystem will likely stick around long term, maintaining a “high-quality pool of talent available for Maker to access and contribute to” while providing a cost-effective avenue to build and maintain NewChain.

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Finally, Christensen noted that as “there already exists examples of the Solana codebase being forked and adapted to act as appchains,” MakerDAO could follow a similar process to develop NewChain.

Back on Twitter, Christensen was questioned on why he favored using Solana code over the EVM.

Christensen noted that while the EVM is the “most important when it comes to building stuff for users, since that’s where the users are,” it doesn’t suit MakerDAO’s specific requirements on the backend.

EVM is still the most important when it comes to building stuff for users, since that’s where the users are. But for a specialized backend for Maker’s specific needs it is not ideal, and solutions like Solana or something like Sei are a much better fit.

— Rune (@RuneKek) September 1, 2023

NewChain will be a backend for the project’s SubDAO tokenomics and governance security. On the other side, its governance token Maker (MKR) and stablecoin Dai (DAI) will continue functioning as usual on Ethereum.

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