State of MakerDAO - Retro | MakerDAO

good morning eat denver there we go my name is retro and i'm here to deliver the state of the dow for maker dao uh reviewing the agenda this morning we're going to briefly introduce everybody who's new from web 2 to web 3 uh what maker is and start exploring the growth of the dao a little bit from there we'll take a deeper dive into ses that's the core unit that i'm a part of if you're not sure what core units are don't worry we'll make sure to cover that in today's talk and from there we'll uh talk about the projects we have going through the rest of the year into 2023 so first let's meet your maker maker is the primary protocol on ethereum that is producing dye we are decentralized and permissionless and any user with an erc20 wallet can mint die from the collateral that they have the stablecoin is soft packed to a dollar and that is the die token the mkr token is then used for governance for impacting and voting on proposals that are introduced to the protocol i want to quickly touch on a great milestone that our team celebrated two mondays ago we minted our 10th billion die as a project this is also there we go this is also important because uh over the past year we have been operating as a true decentralized dow uh from february to february we've seen about a 5x growth in the supply of dai and uh our first billionth die was minted back in november of 2022 so just about 15 months to 10x and about 12 months to 5x but why is that important uh that's important because like i said most of this growth was facilitated from independent teams contributing to maker dao um as core units the core unit framework is a part of the mip framework this is a collection of proposals that is voted on and accepted by governance in order to dictate how the protocol grows changes stability fees accepts collaterals and overall manages the organization the core unit framework is specifically three mips they are mip 39 which is the um overall core unit framework but more importantly it defines the mission of any core unit applying to makerdao the second one or mit 40 is the budget framework that's the mip that requests a specific budget to accomplish a specific goal that mk holder mkr holders have to approve and then the last one is the facilitator framework which simply defines who is leading the uh the core unit the individual so one year ago today we didn't have any gore units that was because the framework was being voted on as well as the first three core units that was up for the march cycle so starting in march we had three core units progressing throughout the year to quarter two we added several across many different domains specifically business operations outreach governments and the product teams and then from there the year continues to progress we continue to add more teams until the this is including some that were voted in in january but we'll call it the end of uh q4 for 2021 with a total of 21 core units now uh i have called out our core unit or the one that i'm a part of ses that is the strategic the sustainable ecosystem scaling core unit and uh the reason that i wanted to point that out on this side is because there's four core units with graduation heads a primary uh deliverable that our core unit has is the incubator because we believe that a part of growing the scalability of the dao is encouraging outside teams to come in specifically our mandate is defined as sustainably growing the maker protocol's moats by removing barriers between decentralized workforce capital and work so let's break that down just a little bit for a second when we talk about decentralized workforce we're talking about contributors both and on maybe token holders maybe new individuals maybe devs since 2017 or maybe somebody like me who's more of a business professional that recently joined within the past year decentralized workforce requires capital in order to facilitate work and these three uh pillars of scalability are usually separated but ses tries to bring them together through research grants and incubation so for research we have uh been working on several projects our core unit was ratified in may so that means from may of 2021 until today we've provided information to the dow through several different projects touching on the research projects we've uh invested a heavy amount of effort into developer attraction onboarding and retention this is uh project x-ray that uh our team has presented on a couple times throughout this uh conference week another research project that we're taking on is transparency controls this includes transparency and quality controls this includes things like budgeting as well as reporting the work that the core units are doing to governance and anytime that our permanent team at scs cannot facilitate the research ourselves because we need to bring in outside expertise we have the ability to leverage a grant uh we'll touch on a little bit of the value that grant has given the dow in just a minute as well as touch on some of the teams that we're incubating but more importantly for the incubator this is really where we see the connection between workforce and work happen by facilitating an on-ramp for some of these outside contributors to come in and then we wrap all of this work with advisory by leading by example uh setting reporting standards that we sell hold ourselves accountable to and encouraging other core units to report along the same guidelines so taking a deeper dive into x-ray we had the initial goal to understand what it meant to provide the best the most successful onboarding experience for developers developers being a key port a key part of the maker protocol we reached out to about 520 developers across 140 different ecosystems and what we found was that attraction onboarding and retention had several pillars that need to be facilitated in order for maker to be the best landing spot for new devs the attraction part of onboarding for contributors starts with twitter the majority of respondents identified that twitter is their primary source for going out into the the marketplace and getting information about any projects related to web 3.0 from there we have to make sure that there's a way that they can have their questions answered whether it's documentation or by providing an again a resource for them to interact with whether it's through the forums in an async manner or actually being available to answer their questions as they reach out once somebody has been attracted and we need to start onboarding them this process needs to be hands-on they're again learning potentially they're learning a new language or new methodology for excuse me potentially these candidates are exploring something new for the first time so having an ecosystem that is able to support them fully is uh going to not only onboard this talent the quickest in order for them to start producing results but also retain them uh again with retention as well the work needs to be stimulating uh people aren't coming to web 3 to continue doing the same work over and over they want to be working with new technology and they want to be working with some of the best communities that are out there maker community for the win thank you all right so to compare and contrast uh research to grants grants our research projects that involved outside ex experts so for this grant project titled real world sandbox we invited industry expert luca prosperi who's been a 15-year investment banker to facilitate for us a framework to turbocharge our efforts to attract real-world assets uh what this document produced is uh an in-depth uh about 12-page uh review of what maker is and how we can attract real-world assets onto the protocol and it's suggested strategies for reorganizing reorganizing our current core units for uh this explosive growth what the research project also turned into was an opportunity for luca to launch his own core unit so we're starting to see this cohesive uh engine being built from research being defined projects being identified resources being identified but now they need an on-ramp to permanently contribute to the dow if for example luca wanted to launch his own core unit he would have to navigate the mipset navigate governance uh draft a bunch of documents and learn about some history that may be buried specifically in forum posts twitter or a variety of other platforms what the ses incubation concept does is it allows a experienced person to benefit from other experienced people for maker so our team is constantly delivering education workshops and guiding these new contributors through the resources that maker has in order for them to launch a successful campaign to be onboarded as a core unit our incubator has been running for about nine months and we have graduated four alumni uh some of which which you may run into today around east denver specifically the dutch core unit focusing on the ux experience for governance the immunofiber security core unit who is amplifying our abilities to compete for offering bounties as well as securing our own infrastructure there's the side stream core unit which is investing effort into improving the ui for our auctions and liquidation systems which is a key feature of the protocol and then tech ops which is improving our maturity as an organization that monitors and watches the health of the protocol we also have five teams currently incubating that and one of them is up for a vote this current cycle which is maker talon meaning that in the next couple weeks we could have our 22nd core unit being added to the dow so again touching onto munify i wanted to do a quick plug for their core unit they recently just launched the largest bug bounty in d5 uh a 10 million dollar bug bounty for maker please feel free to scan your qr code or google a little bit later to see how you can participate so that leaves me for the road ahead uh a lot of the stuff that i just touched on was focused on building the dow from zero core units to the appropriate number needed to support all the functions where do we go from here well the number one thing is continuing to grow the number of contributors that are working in the now the outreach specifically focuses on maker talent again providing that facilitated on-ramp for people interested that want to work for the dell but it also includes something that we're developing called maker academy which is going to reach in to the resources of information that maker currently has build out a website and more of a centralized environment for core unit facilitators to build their own courses as well as maker academy to build courses to deliver information to not only the the maker community but d5 at large we're also looking at uh reorganizing our incubator currently of last year you saw that we were able to uh incubate uh i think it was nine teams or were working with nine teams over the past nine months but we really need to scale that up so what we're looking at doing is instead of incubating teams we're going to be focusing on the facilitator so the facilitator can go out be the resource for his own team and really take ownership of that independent uh group of people contributing to the dow another big push that we have is for real world assets uh the only way that we're going to reach one trillion die is by introducing real world assets to the protocol uh as you could see previously we've invested a lot of research and we're incubating core units associated with that so we can break ground on this exciting new potential for crypto and then last but not least we are also working on ways for core units to collaborate a little bit better right now being individual teams it is a good competitive advantage due to the crossover of certain domains so teams can work together on problems but what we need for them to do is to to break from their silos and support the other aspects of the dow such as content production and the maker academy like we said to build out the uh a very robust system for onboarding talon so that was the uh the state of maker dao uh i am retro like i said uh there is a qr code here for a call to contributors we are looking to grow our skills uh both wide and um both wide and in in in experience so if there is any uh interest in supporting please reach out thank you [Applause] you