MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen has submitted a proposal to build the decentralized finance project’s upcoming native chain off of a fork of Solana’s codebase, and not the Ethereum Virtual Machine despite its long-running ties with Ethereum.
MakerDAO’s native chain or what is currently dubbed as “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 (Twitter) post highlighting the proposal, Christensen stated that: “After some research, I believe the Solana codebase should be considered as the basis for NewChain.”
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.
As such, the MakerDAO co-founder suggested that the Solana ecosystem is likely to stick around long term, maintain a “high-quality pool of talent available for Maker to access and contribute to” while also providing a cost-effective avenue to build and maintain NewChain with.
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 favored using Solana code over 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.
NewChain will essentially serve as a back-end for the project’s SubDAO tokenomics and governance security. On the other side of things, Its governance token Maker and stablecoin Dai will continue to function as usual on Ethereum.