One Maker voter with 97% of the voting power changed the DAI interest rate by 4%. After the vote, the DAI “stability fee” was decreased from 9.5% to 5.5% The address apparently owns 7.5% of total Maker in existence and due to low participation, was able to take the vote into their own hands.
Wow. The @MakerDAO stability fee (interest rate) has dropped to 5.5%.
A single whale (with 97% of voting power) made the decision. Went from 2,489 votes a few hours ago, to 44,539 votes. pic.twitter.com/BpLqeN6ALY
— Daniel Onggunhao (@onggunhao) October 28, 2019
Maker has an intuitive dashboard on their website that makes it easy for Maker (MKR) holders to vote on topics in the ecosystem. The actual MKR token is something like a utility coin for MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin.
In order to vote, you have to “move” maker. This means that the more Maker you can move around, the more a vote will count.
Maker’s voting system is very different than Ethereum because of instances exactly like this. Many would consider Maker’s system plutocratic, where as Ethereum is controlled through public conversations with the core dev team.
It’s a trade off between bigger pockets having a bigger say, and lack of democratic control. Some people don’t mind how one voter changed the DAI interest rate, but an issue more pressing than interest rates could potentially change minds.
I say this normatively, as neither good nor bad. In a perfect world, it’d be great if we had a distributed voter pool for a move this big. The pragmatic reality is that as an early stage, hard-to-understand technology, decision making tends to naturally centralize. - @onggunhao