The vote for Multi-Collateral Dai is now active

MakerDAO just announced on Twitter that MKR holders can vote for the activation of Multi-Collateral Dai. If the vote is passed, Multi-Collateral Dai will be released no later than Monday, November 18th.

Maker’s utility token, MRK is a bit harder to come across than DAI, but holders of it determine a variety of Dai’s parameters. MKR holders vote for the stability fee, savings rate, debt ceiling and now they are voting what is essentially a hard fork of traditional Dai.

MakerDAO has been very confident that the vote will pass, with Founder Rune Christensen saying that it “will” be activated on the 18th. The team does not talk about the vote as often as they talk about when it will be implemented.

MKR holders have a bad record of participating in votes, and in the past there have been circumstances where one voter determined the entire outcome of the stability fee.

The Ethereum core developers don’t allow holders to vote because they believe that people most active in the community should determine the future of the network. MKR is difficult to get, at least in the U.S., so the learning curve to acquire it acts as a way to filter casual users out of the voting process for Dai.

Currently, Dai is only backed by Ethereum, but once Multi-Collateral Dai is implemented, Maker will be able to back it with coins such as BAT, REP and 0x. Christensen has even talked about collateralizing Dai with real world assets, but it doesn’t seem like they plan to do that anytime soon.

If the vote is passed, all holders of Dai and users in collateralized debt positions with Maker will have to manually convert their (now-called) Sai to (MCD) Dai. You can find out how to do that here.