Rune Christensen, co-founder of MakerDAO, has put forth a proposal for the development of MakerDAO’s upcoming native chain, known as “NewChain.” Surprisingly, Christensen suggests building NewChain off a fork of Solana’s codebase rather than the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), despite MakerDAO’s historical ties with Ethereum.
NewChain represents the fifth and final phase of the MakerDAO “Endgame” upgrade, unveiled in May, and is expected to span approximately three years. This phase entails a complete re-implementation of the Maker protocol into a new, independent blockchain.
In a September 1st announcement on X (formerly Twitter), Christensen expressed his belief that the Solana codebase should serve as the foundation for NewChain. He provided three key reasons to support this choice in a proposal on the MakerDAO forum.
Firstly, Christensen commended the “technical quality” of Solana’s codebase, describing it as highly optimized for operating a singular, highly efficient blockchain. He emphasized that Solana’s design takes into account the lessons learned from earlier blockchain challenges and bottlenecks, aligning well with NewChain’s objective of resolving Maker’s technical debt.
Secondly, Christensen noted the resilience of the Solana ecosystem, having weathered challenges such as the FTX blowup. He believes that the Solana ecosystem is likely to remain robust, offering a high-quality talent pool for MakerDAO to collaborate with while providing a cost-effective approach for NewChain’s development and maintenance.
Finally, Christensen highlighted that the Solana codebase has already been successfully forked and adapted for appchains, making it a suitable choice for NewChain’s development.
Responding to inquiries on Twitter about favoring Solana over the EVM, Christensen clarified that while the EVM is crucial for user-facing applications due to its user base, it doesn’t align with MakerDAO’s specific backend requirements. NewChain will serve as the backend for the project’s SubDAO tokenomics and governance security, while the governance token Maker will continue its operations on Ethereum as usual.
