It was a sense of disappointment that pushed Danish entrepreneur Rune Christensen to start his own crypto project. In the years after Bitcoin was created in 2009, he quickly became convinced of the “immense potential of blockchain” but was unimpressed by early projects: Most people were only out to turn a quick buck.
In 2014, Christensen set about trying to build "something useful," he said, something that "mattered for the real world." The result was DAI, a stablecoin whose value does not fluctuate from hour to hour like a regular cryptocurrency but instead is pegged to the U.S. dollar, giving people a way to make purchases safely.
To help govern the stablecoin, Christensen and cofounder Nikolai Mushegian (who is recently deceased) established MakerDAO, one of the earliest examples of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)—a new type of entity with no central leadership. Unlike a traditional business, MakerDAO puts every important decision to a community vote, open to anyone who buys a special kind of token called MKR. It’s a niche concept, but there are roughly 6,000 DAOs in operation—and MakerDAO is one of the biggest, worth almost $6 billion at the height of the value of the MKR token.
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