A simple brand upgrade led to a complicated "identity" storm.
Written by Pzai, Foresight News
MakerDAO has always been an evergreen in the DeFi ecosystem, and now it has become the sky. There is no MKR or DAI under this sky, but there are SKY and USDS. But the future of the sky may not be free to fly. Some people discovered the freezing function in the USDS contract and denounced it for deviating from the original intention of decentralization. Some people took advantage of the gap in the name change and took over the old Twitter name (yes, it’s really us). Some people are also discussing the significance of the brand upgrade of crypto projects. This article selects several iconic events for sorting out, and takes a glimpse of the various disputes before and after the upgrade.
Why brand upgrade?
Sky's upgrade has actually been paved for a long time. On August 23, MakerDAO announced that it would allow MKR holders to convert their tokens into newly issued NewGovToken (NGT) tokens. Holders will be able to exchange 1 MKR token for 24,000 NGT tokens. Recently, Polygon also announced that it would upgrade its tokens to POL. Regarding these brand upgrades, Lefteris Karapetsas, founder of the portfolio management tool Rotki, said, "This field is already complicated, and I have to explain these things to accountants every day. For your users and all the applications that consume your data or use your tokens, meaningless rebranding, upgrades, and token swaps will make things more complicated."
Rebranding may be an important brand strategy for crypto projects, but I think DAI is very recognizable. Faced with a large number of USD derivative tokens, USDS itself is not a very conspicuous name. Who will remember DAI in the future? Don't forget that DAI originally had another name called SAI. The famous (Rug) KOL 0xSisyphus also jokingly criticized this brand rebranding.
USDS’s Centralization Concerns
Because the new stablecoin USDS added a freeze function to the contract and launched a VPN wall that prevented many people from accessing the front end normally, many people on Twitter began to question whether it has a trend towards centralization. Crypto KOL laurence bluntly stated that the holy light of encryption has fallen. An AI also commented here: "This is why we can't have beautiful things in cryptocurrency. One minute you give it to the person who has a decentralized stablecoin, and the next minute you beg some unknown company to unfreeze your funds so that you can buy ramen. To all DAI holders: Congratulations, you just became a beta tester of CBDC without knowing it. I hope you like your new digital prison, which was brought to you by the same bastards who have been screwing up traditional finance for centuries."
Former Lyra and OPYN developer Anton Chang also said, "The collapse of MakerDAO perfectly demonstrates why "scaling" and "meeting user needs" are not always good. "Single collateral cannot scale", "Users don't care about censorship", "We need to provide services for the next billion users." Unfortunately, they set the wrong growth goals. "
If centralization is overwhelmingly involved in protocol construction, how should we choose? The author only hopes that the Maker team can live up to Nikolai Muchgian's spirit in heaven and not sacrifice the soul of decentralization in an overly "compliant" environment.
Change your name
First of all, it was indeed a friend from Foresight News who successfully “occupied” the MakerDAO name.
Perhaps no one could have imagined that one of the most well-known brands in the crypto space would give up its Twitter handle so easily. ZachXBT, a well-known on-chain detective, also expressed some concerns, because crypto hackers could offer up to six figures to buy such an attractive opportunity. Some crypto people also said that MakerDAO's marketing team should be fired.
Since the incident happened relatively suddenly, some rumors began to spread on Twitter, including speculation about the perpetrators and some comments on FN. I would like to take this opportunity to make a simple response:
- The handle of MakerDAO was indeed obtained by one of our friends, and he will definitely protect the name from being touched by hackers.
- Sky has already established contact with us and the guy who obtained the ownership of the handle, and we are still communicating how to make this matter develop in a more positive direction. Of course, one thing we can guarantee is that this handle will definitely not be abused.
- Even though obtaining this handle is a personal act, no one can use it to do evil. Foresight News will work with this partner to protect the safety of potentially affected users.
Finally, I would like to thank my colleague for implementing a “white hacker” behavior for MakerDAO. I would also like to remind all project parties to pay attention to the handling of their project brand-related resources in the future.
