Rune Christensen clarified during a DeFi Nation conference call that he expects Ethereum to be the primary backer of Dai even after the Multi-Collateral iteration is released.
“I totally expect that in the beginning it will just be Eth primarily that will be used” - Rune Christiansen
He added that releasing MCD at this time is mostly so that Maker can start figuring out what happens when they have multiple collateral types.
Tokens included in Multi-Collateral Dai aren’t widely used
The initial tokens that can be collateralized for Dai in addition to Ethereum and Augur’s REP, Basic Attention Token, and 0x. While these are widely known within the crypto space, the are all around under the top 25 in terms of market cap.
It’s no surprise that Christensen expects that Ethereum will be the dominant collateral as it still holds a spot as the second highest market cap coin.
Since all three are Ethereum based tokens, they should allow for easy integration into Maker’s network. That could be one reason for the choices along with not having a significant amount of users, or room to drop in price could allow for easy testing.
Maker still likes Ethereum
“Eth is a very good asset that can carry DeFi very far.”
Christensen showed optimism in Ethereum in the immediate sense, but also recognized that DeFi shouldn’t be the only thing that grows the Ethereum network. He compared DeFi pushing Ethereum as the cart pushing the horse. Dai is supposed to pull the stability out of Ethereum rather than push its price.
Still, transactions are Ethereum’s life blood, and adding more collateral means more transactions. Christensen even played with the idea of backing Dai with real world assets, and mentioned how that could push the price of Ethereum.
At the end of the day, Maker wants to push it’s product to as many people as possible and believes that if DeFi continues to scale, it can’t be backed by only Ethereum.