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HackerOne User Finds Critical Bug in MakerDAO Upgrade

MakerDAO has fixed a critical bug that could have resulted in a complete loss of funds for all Dai users thanks to HackerOne user lucash-dev.

Bug Bounty Hunter

Lucash-dev took part in MakerDao’s bug bounty program and made the first critical finding in MakerDao’s planned Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD) upgrade. In a report submitted on Oct. 1st, lucash-dev wrote that the bug could have enabled an attacker to steal all collateral store on the MCD system, potentially in one fell swoop.

From the report, lucash-dev cites a complete lack of access control in a MakerDao smart contract as the bug-enabler. Quoted from the report, “A lack of validation in the method of flip.kick allows an attacker to create and auction with a fake bid value. Since the end contract trusts that (fake-bid) value, it can be exploited to issue any amount of free Dai during liquidation. That Dai can then be immediately used to obtain all collateral storied in the end contract.”

After identifying the security flaw, lucash-dev was awarded a $50,000 bounty. The bug was discovered during the testing phase of the MCD upgrade before general user-access had been granted.

Image via Shutterstock

Blockchain.News Presents: State of DeFi Survey

“Decentralized finance (DeFi) essentially involves a brand-new monetary system being built on public blockchains.” With the advent of blockchain, the concept of DeFi arises from the fact that there are 1.7 billion people do not have the right material or access to financial services. As a result, the wealth generated is not efficiently transferred to the unbanked population. Decentralization, as a concept allows for identical records to be kept in thousands of computers through peer to peer networks, adding to the fact that access can be granted to everyone!

DeFi is one of the hottest topics in the crypto world in 2019. According to the recent findings by dapp.com, DeFi gained tremendous growth in Q3 2019 with a market value of over USD 525 million. 88% of DeFi dApps are built on Ethereum, and MakerDAO and Nest are the two leading DeFi dApps. Finance dApps ranks 2nd in terms of trading volume, and gambling dApps remains its dominance.

Blockchain.News is proud to present the “State of DeFi Survey”! We would love to hear your thoughts on DeFi, as well as its challenges and future prediction by 25 Oct.

Take part in our survey now!

https://forms.gle/f9oDeG4djJGMrpiy6

Dai Stablecoin Reaches 100 Million in Debt Ceiling – An All-Time-High

The Dai (DAI) stablecoin reached the protocol’s built-in debt ceiling of 100 million as there have been 100 million Dai tokens minted. The nearly two-year-old stablecoin project had an original debt ceiling of 50 million, which was raised to 100 million in July 2018.

Dai, created by MakerDAO, has a core function of allowing users to borrow or generate Dai by staking their cryptocurrencies as collateral. The MakerDao team and its community members are planning a governance vote on Nov. 8 to raise the debt ceiling by an additional 10-20 million.

Unlike other stablecoins that are backed by fiat currencies or commodities, Dai is not supported by reserve currencies, but rather Ether generated collateralized debt position (CDP) smart contracts.

Rune Christensen, CEO of the Maker Foundation, announced on Oct. 9 that the foundation would release a multi-collateral Dai (MCD) later this month. Changes to the nomenclature of its current asset will be made with the release of the new coin.

The new user interface of the Maker Protocol after the release of MCD will label CDPs as “Vault.” MCD would allow users to stake assets as collateral, and Ether will be stored in an Ether vault, while Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) would be stored in a BAT vault.

Image via Shutterstock

The Dapp of 2019? How MakerDAO Took Charge of the DeFi Field

The MakerDao project is the contemporary success story for decentralized finance (DeFi). The project went live in December 2017, with DAI as the USD stablecoin and MKR functioning as the governance token. In the world of decentralized finance, MakerDAO is by far the most popular application running on Ethereum and has been steadily increasing traction since its launch. After only a year and a half into production, MakerDao reached its all-time high market cap of $97M on July 9, 2019.

In part one of our interview with Gustav Arentoft, Business Development, Dai Speaker, MakerDAO, he offers Blockchain.News insight into the home-grown success of his organizations in terms of transparency, governance and the interesting use case of Maker in Spotify.

Steady growth of DAI despite dropping market dominance

According to DeFi Pulse, the total ether deposited in MakerDao represents just above 50 percent of the total value locked into DeFi protocols. While still dominant it marks a significant decrease from the 90 percent recorded at the start of the year. While the percentage has fallen, Arentoft believes, “It really depends on what you look at as dominating factors. Currently, the rankings are defined by the number of crypto assets locked into a DeFi protocol. We were one of the first projects that you could actually lock up Ethereum to print DAI against so of course, our market dominance was much higher previously.” Commenting on the increased competition Arentoft said, “Fortunately some of these new players have come along, like Compound which has had a very strong performance over the last 12 months. There are also different protocols like Uniswap, but the incredible thing is these new protocols—they take DAI and actually one of their primary use cases in their system and protocols is using Dai. For example, Compound dominates the holding of DAI with 12.6M. So we may have lost market cap but that market cap went into other protocols that utilize Dai in efficient ways and even open up some very strong arbitrage opportunities.”

Exhibit 1: DAI Locked in DeFi 2019

Source: DeFi Pulse

Due to the nature of the DeFi ecosystem, ultimately Maker’s lost market cap is benefiting the end consumers as the various protocols are interoperable (see Exhibit 1). Arentoft said, “The protocols continue to leverage each other’s technology and awesome products and services are being created for end-users, so we are not overly concerned about the perceived loss in dominance because Dai will still be the stable value in these systems.” He concluded, “If you look at us from just a crypto perspective, we might continue to appear shoulder to shoulder against these very competitive and good products but if you look from the outside, I believe we will be one of the first projects to bring legacy world collateral into the smart contract-based systems.”

Bringing liquidity to Spotify’s artists

Turning to use cases and partnerships, Arentoft discussed a Maker’s collaboration with Paperchain—an extremely efficient data analytics provider which leverages data which can be publicly viewed on platforms such as Spotify.

Arentoft said, “The problem that we’re solving is that currently the artists streamed on Spotify have to wait a long time before they actually receive their royalties and payments, so we’ve created an extremely efficient and accurate data analytics tool to basically predict the amount owed down to a 1% difference. This creates an alternative asset that traditional institutions are not used to serving, however, it is an asset that’s actually relatively easy to price.”

On the Spotify project, Maker has been working with an open-source framework from Centrifuge, Arentoft said, ‘’We basically can take these individual royalties which are converted into NFTs and then you can actually create a standardized version of the collateral, which we didn’t aim to use in multi-collateral Dai.” He explained, “That basically means that U.S. and Spotify artists can predict their future income. They can leverage the blockchain and the MakerDao protocol to actually gain an advance payment on the royalties that the artist will be getting. It is a new way of bringing liquidity to artists basically.”

Maker’s Transparency and Decentralized Governance

Maker’s enjoys an unmatched degree of popularity among the DeFi community. Arentoft believes that this can be attributed to the very high degree of transparency within the organization. He said, “I think we have one of the only projects that has verifiable revenue directly on the blockchain, enhancing the transparency of fees coming to us and the overall movement of capital in the blockchain. If you want to check it out, you can go to the website called Makerburn.com which in real-time and shows everything going through the system.”

On Maker’s governance as a decentralized autonomous organization, Arentoft commented, “We have been live with the ability to execute on-chain governance since 2017. In the future, governance is going to be a little bit more tricky because there’ll be a lot more different kinds of decisions to make regarding the structure.” He continued, “But the governance of Maker was something which started out in many ways as an experiment and now with a proven track record, we have shown that this is something that actually works.”

MakerDAO’s Popularity: Behind the scenes

Arentoft believes that there are many different factors that have contributed to the success of Maker’s decentralized autonomous governance. He elaborated, “We have had very strong support within the Ethereum community and I think we have one of the first strong use cases has managed to manifest itself, which in turn has created a sphere of people who wants to participate.”

Maker has also been very open and transparent about issues within their protocol such as the common pain point of scalability but has continued to engage their community throughout the process of addressing these issues. Arentoft couples this enhanced transparency with Maker’s strategy to attach themselves to projects that have the greatest growth potential as further indications of the economic communities’ interest and patronage. Arentoft divulged, “We truly project that we can go out and change the lives of everyday people right, at tremendous scale. I think people want to join that movement and the future prospect and at the same time, the Maker project has drawn the attention of the people who tend to hang around in macroeconomics circles. We have some strong followers, both from central banks and prestigious academic communities so I think there’s a lot of different elements that when combined make Maker a pretty interesting and quite outstanding project.”

Stay tuned for Part 2 and 3 of MakerDAO’s interview.

MakerDAO, on the Significance of Multi-Collateral Dai and Dai Savings Rate

Exclusive interview with Gustav Arentoft: Part 2 (Link: Part 1)

MakerDao is the protocol behind Dai, the world’s first decentralized stablecoin and the contemporary success story for decentralized finance (DeFi). The project went live in December 2017, with Dai as the USD stablecoin and Maker functioning as the governance token. In the world of decentralized finance, MakerDao is by far the most popular DeFi protocol running on the Ethereum network and has been steadily increasing traction since its launch. After only a year and a half into production, MakerDao reached its all-time high market cap of $97M on July 9, 2019.

In part two of our interview with Gustave Arentoft, Business Development, Dai Speaker, MakerDAO: he shared with us the significance of the launch of multi-collateral DAI and Dai Savings Rate (DSR), as well as his favourite Dapps which integrates DSR.

The Future of Digital Cash Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD) represents the future of digital cash, with a new Dai Savings Rate feature and the activation of a smart contract that paves the way for new collateral assets to back Dai. Maker is touting its arrival as a significant step towards the vision of creating a decentralized platform to help level the economic playing field for people around the world.

MCD was activated on the MakerDAO system on Nov. 18. MCD, as its name states, will enable users to create Dai stablecoins backed by multiple collateral types. The initial collaterals for MCD will be ether and basic attention tokens. The introduction of MCD also allows for today’s launch of the Dai Savings Rate (DSR), a feature that makes it possible to earn savings simply by holding Dai.

Arentoft commented on the launch saying, “It’s very similar to having a US dollar-denominated savings account. It works as a form of staking, the savings accounts will take some part of the profits from the system and distribute them back to the users on the system. One of the benefits of having a decentralized system is that we don’t have to abide by traditional monetary policy but can instead focus a lot more on helping people.”

The Dai savings feature could not only offer a shield to users living in regions where it becomes necessary to guard oneself against rampant currency inflation and poor government monetary policies, but it will also carry an interest rate which will potentially increase the users’ wealth. Reflecting on a personal note, Arentoft said, “I lived in Argentina for a year and a half before joining Maker, so I really have firsthand experience living in the oblivion of monetary uncertainty. Trust me, a Dai savings account would have been a gift from heaven during that period to protect myself and my finances, so I know that this product will really be capable of creating a very positive impact in communities that are often facing fiscal uncertainty.”

MCD Functionality and the Vault

In order to support MCD functionality and its features, such as the DSR and new collateral types, the core Maker Protocol smart contracts were rewritten. Therefore, users and partners interacting with Sai must upgrade their existing Sai tokens to Multi-Collateral Dai tokens (Dai) and Vaults (formerly CDPs) to the new system. Additionally, companies or projects integrated with Sai and Vaults must update their codebases to point to the new smart contracts and support the updated functions.

Arentoft offered some clarification on the change in terminology, “It was felt that some of these words weren’t really accurately describing what they really represented and bore too many similarities to traditional financial instruments. Therefore, a decision was made to go out and create some more informative terms—the vault, for instance, just represents the ability to hold collateral in the system, and the visual trigger represents how safe it is to actually hold assets and collateral in our system.”

Migration webpage of MCDSource: MakerDAO website

DSR Dapps

Prior to the launch of the MCD, the team at Maker rigorously tested the smart-contracts to uncover and integration issues and to ensure the decentralized applications (Dapps) featuring Dai on the Maker protocol would support MCD functionality.

Arentoft discussed some of his favourite Dapps, he said, “My personal favorite is Argent—it is a very easy to use smart contract based wallet that will have the DSR on launch as well as CDPs.” He added, “Of course there is Wirex, one of the biggest debit card providers with three million registered users, obviously it will greatly appeal to our users if you can keep Dai on a debit card while earning savings interest, which their product will. The key to these products is easy user accessibility and functionality as the world of decentralized finance can be a daunting place to the uninitiated.”

The Future is What We MAKER

Following the launch of the MCD, Maker will still have plenty of projects on the horizon. Arentoft shared, “We’re going to make a few enhancements to the infrastructure as well as build a token representation of the DSR. We also want to take a more focused and proactive approach with our partners and offer more in terms of support and resources.” Concluding our interview, he said, “In general, on the partnership side of things, we’ve already been pretty successful. This year, we’ve scaled from just 100 projects to 400 projects that use Dai in one form or another—we would like to continue to scale up. We don’t have anything as major as the MCD or DSR coming out but in fairness these are probably two of the biggest innovations ever in cryptocurrency so we can’t be expected to change the game every year. But there’s still a lot of exciting things to come so definitely stay tuned.

Stay tuned on Part 3 of MakerDAO’s interview, on staying compliant over 400 global partnerships!

How Does MakerDAO Stay Compliant on over 400 Global Partnerships?

Exclusive Interview with Gustav Arentoft of MakerDAO (Link: Part 1 and Part 2)

MakerDao is the protocol behind Dai, the world’s first decentralized stablecoin and the contemporary success story for decentralized finance (DeFi). The project went live in December 2017, with Dai as the USD stablecoin and Maker functioning as the governance token. In the world of decentralized finance, MakerDao is by far the most popular DeFi protocol running on the Ethereum network and has been steadily increasing traction since its launch. After only a year and a half into production, MakerDao reached its all-time high market cap of $97M on July 9, 2019.

In part three of our interview with Gustave Arentoft, Business Development, Dai Speaker, MakerDAO: he talks to Blockchain.News regarding the necessity for decentralized banking for the institutionally unbanked and regulatory requirements for operating across multiple jurisdictions.

Regulating on the Edges

Maker has users in over 120 separate and specifically financially regulated jurisdictions across the globe. To regulate a truly decentralized entity, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, at its core to satisfy every local financial compliance protocol is basically “not possible” according to Arentoft. “We regulate where the lending protocols meet the jurisdiction. So with a decentralized product you don’t regulate the core but you regulate on the edges, the edges which meet the specific local jurisdiction.”

Maker has more than 400 different partnerships globally. These partners are already using DAI and collateralized debt positions (CDP), Arentoft stated that every single time a project is tied to any legal jurisdiction, compliance with local regulation must be made but he explained this process is often simplified by their active partners’ foothold in that particular jurisdiction. He said, “For example, one of our partners is Wirex, which is a debit card company, and they have an e-money license in the UK to operate—so that’s one way Maker becomes regulated in regards to the UK’s jurisdiction as that company uses our product within the local regulatory guidelines. Regulation is something that we’re really on the forefront with and we try to ensure that we won’t get ourselves or any of our partners in trouble with regulators.”

Education is the Key

In regards to regulators, Arentoft believes that they have been labeled as having fairly negative approaches to crypto and token regulation, whereas he feels it is more a matter of education at this point and that it is a necessity for developers to be a part of the growing conversation. On meeting the regulators at the Singapore FinTech Festival, he said, “I felt that they really wanted to learn and explore this space not just reject it.”

Maker were invited to present on the future of sustainable finance by the Asian Development Bank a week prior to the Singapore FinTech Festival. Arentoft again highlighted that there is an outsider perception that DeFi organizations are met with nothing but vitriol from the central banks who are perceived as only viewing the technology as a threat to their traditional institutions. He stated, “41 central banks were present and what they actually are focused on is that we have the ability to serve people that banks had previously deemed too unprofitable to service. For banks to set up an affiliate abroad is a very expensive process compared to downloading an app on your smartphone.” He added, “If you look at the predicted increasing smartphone adoption rate for the next few years, it will allow us to work together with these banks in areas that require our operations to bank the unbanked—our mission is to help these people after all.”

The Top Dapps to Consider Using in 2020

Dapps have brought a significant change in the field of blockchain technology. They are a new type of software applications, which does not undergo downtime, and cannot be shut down by anybody, and are not owned by a central authority. They are open-source software, which uses smart contracts to run transactions on a blockchain. Decentralized applications are making inroads in various fields like gambling, technology, education, finance, and other domains.

MakerDao

MakerDao is a decentralized credit service that runs on the Ethereum blockchain platform. Maker consists of community governance, collateral loans, and decentralized stablecoin (Dai).

Digital assets like Ether and Bitcoin are highly volatile and cannot be used as a day-to-day currency. The Dai cryptocurrency is stablecoin whose value is attached to the US dollar.

Stablecoins such as Dai is necessary for realizing the entire potential of blockchain. Dai strengthens financial services in the cryptocurrency world with stable prices against fiat currencies.

Anybody can use MakerDAO to open a CDP (collateralized debt position), lock in Ethereum as collateral, and generate Dai as a debt against that collateral.

MetaMask

MetaMask is a type of bridge, which allows users to run Ethereum Dapps directly in the browser without running a full Ethereum node. With its secure identity wall, MetaMask provides users with a platform to manage their identities on various sites and initiate transactions in the blockchain. Any user can install the MetaMask add-on in Opera, Firefox, and Chrome.

LivePeer

LivePeer is a Dapp which was launched in 2017. Developers use it for adding on-demand or live videos for their projects. LivePeer’s main aim is to increase video streaming and minimize its scaling cost. The rising demand for live streaming amongst consumers for news and entertainment has led to LivePeer’s growth. LivePeer aims to reduce the price of transactions based on the use of crypto-economic incentive mechanisms.

Votechain

Votechain is a form of a decentralized voting system that runs on a blockchain network. The voting system aims to improve the voting procedure and reduce fraud during voting by implementing a hybrid of both digital and physical blockchain voting options.

The creators designed the app in connection with suspected voting fraud in 2018 Mexico’s elections. This application will offer users the facility to vote from their mobile phones.

MTonomy

MTonomy is a decentralized application that provides secure blockchain infrastructure to monetize, distribute, and license digital media content like books, music, and movies.

MTonomy provides rights and content management services for distributors, service providers, and content owners, including the leading cryptocurrency-based VOP application for consumers. In other words, MTonomy is a streaming platform for cryptocurrency users.

Ethlance

Ethlance is a kind of job market platform built entirely on a blockchain. Anybody can access it as its database is built on the Ethereum public blockchain network. The platform uses crypto for payments.

Ethlance doesn’t charge any fees, and the entire amount paid by the employers is passed to the freelancers. The only cost that participants have to bear is the gas for transacting on the network.

SpankChain

SpankChain is an adult entertainment platform powered by blockchain technology. It was built by using the concept of Ethereum.

The platform offers complete privacy by eliminating the need for third-party intermediaries through the use of smart contracts. The Dapp has been recognized as a revolutionary technological and economic platform for the adult industry.

Can MakerDAO Survive the Coronavirus Pandemic?

The coronavirus pandemic and growing macroeconomic uncertainties have seriously dampened the cryptocurrency market, which Bitcoin once dipped below $4000. The “Red Sea” has expanded across the market of decentralized finance (DeFi), where the total value locked (USD) for the DeFi market dropped from $649M to $246M.

Widespread Concerns over MakerDAO community

The share plunge of the cryptocurrency market has severely hit MakerDAO, the leader in the DeFi ecosystem. Maker (MKR) resulted in a massive drop to $246M, compared to $889M a day ago. Such a sharp plunge of Maker’s market value led to widespread concern on the future of Maker. The community-initiated the thread in the MakerDAO forum, in particular, addressing the issue of whether MakerDAO will consider an Emergency Shutdown in the short term.

Per the “Black Thursday Response Thread” initiated by developer “LongForWisdom” on March 13, the community discussed the current actions are taken, the arrangement of regularly scheduled polls and a possible emergency shutdown in the short term. Apart from the forum discussion, Maker has published a blog post regarding the next steps to be taken amid a recent market crash.

Emergency Shutdown is not an Immediate Option

The official blogpost of Maker revealed that there is no planned emergency shutdown, with Ethereum developer Ryan Berckmans concluded a summary of Maker community call stating,

“An emergency shutdown (not happening now) would cause DAI holders to take a haircut, whereas the social contract of MakerDAO is that MKR tokens take a haircut in the event of system failure. Therefore, we should try and ensure that MKR holders take a hair cut by avoiding emergency shutdown if possible. I heard that an emergency shutdown is not being considered as an immediate option.”

Key Changes to be Made

While Maker has no intention to an immediate shutdown, the Foundation agrees that the following issues need to be addressed:

1) DAI is off-peg

The cryptocurrency market has seen a wide “Red Sea”, except for stablecoins such as multi-collateral DAI (MCD). Following the global stock market crash, the price of multi-collateral DAI (MCD) lost the dollar peg and reached USD 1.07. To restore the pegging between MCD and USD, the MakerDAO community is proposing the reduction of DAI Saving Rate (DSR) which brings more DAI in circulation and thus moving the DAI price closer to the $1 peg. Another proposal is the reduction of global stability fee, an attempt to narrow the MCD/USD spread by opening more vaults (formerly known as collateralized debt positions) for arbitrage on the price of DAI.

2) How does MakerDAO settle 4.5M Debt?

With the 30% price drop in Ethereum, some vaults that use Ethereum to mint DAI can dip below the collateralization requirement of 150% and thus undercollateralized. The sharp plunge in the Ethereum price made a lot of vaults available for liquidation. When multiple users liquidated their contracts, this led to the congestion of the Ethereum network and the gas price surged significantly.

During the liquidation process, collateral is auctioned for DAI to repay any outstanding debts. When there is not enough liquidity for keepers to absorb all the liquidations, and one keeper bid $0 ETH with no competition. The lack of competition means bidders can win liquidation auctions without exchange of DAI. As a result, some vaults are liquidated without any DAI circulate back into the system, leading to a 4.5m outstanding under-collateralized debt owed in the MakerDAO system.

To settle the outstanding debts, Maker decided to conduct the first-ever debt auction. According to the official whitepaper, the protocol debt is covered by DAI in the Maker Buffer. The Maker protocol will trigger a debt auction if DAI in Maker Buffer is insufficient to cover the debt. In the debt auction, the system mints MKR token to increase the amount of MKR in circulation, and the minted MKR token will be sold to bidders of DAI.

Results of Executive Voting

The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator conducted the executive voting on “Adjust Multiple Risk Parameters”. Apart from the risk parameters to restore the peg and debt repayment, the proposal also included the reduction of the debt ceiling and adjustments in Flip and Flop auction. The proposal is passed on March 13 07:14 (UTC). The proposed adjustment of multiple risk parameters will be available for execution on March 14.

Image via Shutterstock

MakerDAO May Onboard USDC as DAI Collateral Support to Combat Mounting Liquidity Risk

The share plunge of the cryptocurrency market has severely hit MakerDAO, the leader in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Last week its market value fell sharply from 889M to $246M which brought together Maker’s developer community who have recently discussed adding support for Circle’s USDC as collateral to hedge against the liquidity risk.

MakerDao Foundation’s Developer Team hosted a public meeting this morning where the discussion focused on the code on the collateral adaptor for USDC.

According to the official thread, adding the stablecoin as collateral will help to create liquidity for Maker’s Dai stablecoin and push the Dai peg back towards $1 – “The mechanism of this looks like: Lock USDC -> Mint Dai -> Sell for USDC -> Repeat.”

The thread also states USDC collateral, “ Will allow Vault Holders to close their Vaults without eating the loss on the Dai peg being high against USD.”

Diluted DAI

First on the list of the author’s perceived negatives of adding USDC support would be the reduced decentralized purity of Maker’s Dai. Introducing a US dollar backed stablecoin could also hold a regulatory risk and may result in Circle blacklisting the locked up collateral due to KYC concerns.

During the call, a MakerDAO representative dismissed the Dai dilution argument stating, “ DAI is decentralized because there is no central authority that mints or custodies or approves people’s access to it. The individual does all of it for themselves, that’s why the community is driving the parameters of the systems (per the discussions in forum).”

The representative emphatically summarised, “To say that DAI is not decentralized because of some of the assets that might back it would be erroneous.”

Finding a New Peg for Dai

As reported by Blockchain.News on March 13, following the global stock market crash, the price of multi-collateral DAI (MCD) lost the dollar peg and reached USD 1.07.

To restore the pegging between MCD and USD, the MakerDAO community also has proposed the reduction of DAI Saving Rate (DSR) which brings more DAI in circulation and thus moving the DAI price closer to the $1 peg.

The Maker Foundation have confirmed that they are now making the technical preparations to onboard Circle’s USDC as collateral, but no strategy to restore Dai’s peg has received a confirmation vote yet from Maker’s governance council.

Image via Shutterstock

World Economic Forum Recognized Six Blockchain Companies as “Technology Pioneers” in 2020, Including MakerDAO and Chainlink

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has honored six blockchain companies on its list of 100 “early to growth-stage” firms Technology Pioneers for 2020, including MakerDAO and Chainlink.

The other blockchain and crypto firms that were recognized as pioneering new technologies and innovations in 2020 include Lightning Labs, Elliptic, Ripio, and Veridium Labs.

These blockchain companies were chosen along with the 94 other companies around the world for their contributions to the use of “artificial intelligence to diagnose cancers and quantum computing systems to carbon capture and removing technologies.”

According to the Forum, Technology Pioneers are an integral part of the organization’s Global Innovators community, an invitation-only group of the world’s most promising startups in the tech industry. The World Economic Forum noted:

“Technology Pioneers begin a two-year journey where they are part of the World Economic Forum’s initiatives, activities, and events, bringing their cutting-edge insight and fresh thinking to critical global discussions.”

The MakerDAO project took off in December 2017, with DAI as a US dollar stablecoin and MKR functioning as the governance token. MakerDAO has become the most popular application running on Ethereum and the project has reached its all-time high market cap of $97 million in July 2019.

Blockchain.News previously interviewed Gustav Arentoft, Business Development and Dai Speaker at MakerDAO, who offered his insights into the success of his organizations in transparency and governance.

Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, one of the companies selected by the Forum said:

“Using smart contracts on the blockchain to bring enforceable guarantees to contractual obligations has widespread social and economic benefits. We’re proud to play a role in bringing accountability and automation to global and local economies, and we look forward to contributing to Forum dialogues on this challenge.”

As far as blockchain companies go, Ripple has been named as the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer in 2015, while Blockchain.com has been named in 2016, for its role in empowering millions around the world to authenticate and conduct transactions globally.