Exclusive Interview with MAKERDAO Co-Founder Rune Christensen | KBW 2023

[Music] I think South Korea and Japan are really really amazing for as crypto markets basically because I mean the most important thing they got big communities right they've got a lot of people that like to buy crypto and whole crypto but also they have this very um you know very stable and very positive and sort of reliable long-term Outlook in terms of Regulation and sort of the the politics around crypto unlike other some other places where there's like a risk it could get banned or there's sort of resistance these countries is very you know Pro Innovation right and that's really that feels great as a crypto project thinking about where do you want to sort of put your ex right where do you want to risk it long term I think these are very good places and then finally there's just great developer communities as well which is [Music] important so I think basically the old school model of dows that people have been trying for the last many years it basically doesn't scale like it just gets too big and then it stops being possible to have so many people coordinate and the solution to this is what we are basically now introducing I mean that's also what I'm here in Korea promoting right and it's called subow right so what you have to do is you have to you have to sort of split up the complexity so it's not all in one place but you actually have you know so in the same ecosystem you can have many different smaller Dows with their own tokens their own communities their own decisions right and then they can specialize so this way you don't everything doesn't get overly complex as you get bigger you just get more subs and then they each take care of their own little sort of piece of the pie that they are the specialists in and I think this approach actually can scale and can become very decentralized and still uh you know maintain a large scale without failing so I think that's uh that's what's going to happen for Dows and and how they're going to grow and so endgame is this big transformation that primarily revolves around subow and basically setting maker up for long-term growth um and so phase one that's like what we call the beta launch basically that's sort of preparing uh setting the stage uh preparing the for this transformation phase two is like the full launch that's the moment when the subow launch and the sub out to the sub out tokens they launch and users can start staking to get them for free right so the way it works is you just need to be a user of the system and hold the you have to basically take your die stable coin upgrade it and then after upgrading it you can stake it and then you can get a subd DI token uh you know you get it for free as yield and then the key question is which subd di do you want to get because there's going to be many different ones they will all launch at the same time uh so this is how this specialization occurs right the communities can sort of self-organize people who are into real assets and finance they can all uh you know stake to get those sub out tokens and then they can focus on that in their governance and uh you know people who in Innovation and defi they can stay to get spark Dow which is another of these subd Dows that we are here also um you know educating about in Korea and so what we also found is actually in Korea a lot of Koreans they're very excited about Spark so this is likely going to be also sub that that sort of helps organize the Korean community and become sort of the Gateway into how we can you know more effectively be able to interact with Korea and the opportunities in Korea because if you really want to do that the right way you you know you got to have actual Koreans right you got to have the people that know how to do it and the thing is subow allow this specialization and there ability to understand what's happening on the ground and which is like the benefit of being small yet it's combined with the benefit of a massive ecosystem like maker right so you get sort of The Best of Both Worlds and I think once we see that in action it's going to just like change this the industry right because it's going to fix some of these really fundamental problems that we've been running into all the time in the past spk is the token for sparle that I just talked about that is this Defi and Innovation focused subtle and so really what they bring to the table for the ecosystem is it means now there is a dedicated token for those who specifically want to do governance and Community around the really cutting edge Innovation right so it means that you know instead of having to be an expert in everything and then get super confused and not be clear about how you're supposed to vote we can just have the people who just know something about Defi and want to learn about defi now they can focus on this token and that's going to make it a lot you know again like easier for them right it's not going to be so confusing because they don't have to be an expert and everything they can just focus on on the specialization of of sparow uh and the same thing for the Korea market right and just in general if you're Korean if you don't speak English it's going to be a hard time for you to like go into some random subow right spark is like a place where you know there's going to be other Koreans you know that you can talk to others in Korean right and it it's all about making the you know participating in a dow a lot more easy and accessible and not so frustrating another really interesting thing about spark D specifically is you can actually already Farm it now so already now if you use spark protocol which is this new very Innovative Cutting Edge lending engine um then if you use it today to borrow with or you deposit eth you already start pre- farming some spk tokens I think what we have been going through in this industry with the last Bull Run and then just like the total collapse and humiliating humili of the industry it's like I mean it's the natural cycle of everybody gets excited and then there's a bunch of hot air and a bunch of nothing basically that people throw money at and you got scammers and taking advantage of the situation right the reality is that there really wasn't that much in crypto the whole time right you know and what's important is instead of focusing on chasing the hard fed and and you know pumping and all this stuff we need to focus on building real things that have real value and the market now understands this so crypto isn't going to come back defi isn't going to come back until we start building you know stuff that's actually useful right and um you know I think the main thing that's going to bring this to the table is going to be maker sub outs right because maker is the project that basically I mean we're the only project that has real growth currently right the the die stable coin grew by 800 million in the last month so we have that growth and we have that momentum and that's because we have develop that capacity to build real stuff with blockchain right real products real technology right actual Innovation that isn't just speculation and then what we're doing with subow is now we are taking that and we're sort of packaging it in these easy to access new tokens that we will then be basically giving away for free through staking so the whole ecosystem can get access to these and get to be a part of this and I think that's just going to bring a completely new Dynamic to the right that's going to open up for a type of exponential growth and you know Innovation explosion that this time isn't going to be you know a bunch of hot air that turns out to be nothing this time it's going to be real and that's because that's what maker brings to the table right we know how to make sure it's kept that way and then the whole industry the whole Community I mean that's where all the passion all the excitement is and I think we're going to see a lot of that uh start basically interacting positively with maker and with these sub out tokens