There’s plenty of bustle happening around MakerDAO’s dollar-pegged Dai stablecoin right now.
For one, on August 14th the team behind the blockchain-based legal agreement protocol OpenLaw announced they’d be integrating the Ethereum ecosystem’s darling stablecoin as the “medium of exchange of choice for on-chain financial transactions on OpenLaw.”
As the ConsenSys-backed team explained of the meld:
“To that end, we’ve integrated Dai into OpenLaw Finance to show how Dai can be used as the medium of exchange for legally compliant tokenized securities, fixed income products, tokenized real estate, and smart derivatives. As a result, anyone can now manage their blockchain-based financial transactions using OpenLaw’s open-source tools. Dai can continue its path towards achieving a status as a global currency.”
The project’s builders went on to illustrate the example of how the new Dai embrace would allow OpenLaw users the ability to create so-called “smart derivatives” like interest swap agreements that would be calculated in Dai and built on Ethereum.
OpenLaw and @MakerDAO are working together to make #DAI a global currency. Now, you can settle real-world financial transactions in DAI using OpenLaw Finance (https://t.co/V9RLqXKEkD). We’re making #defi a reality. Check out more👇https://t.co/ykhyw4ttrR
— OpenLaw (@OpenLawOfficial) August 14, 2019
“In the same way that the US Dollar is a standard currency in global financial contracts, we believe that Dai can be a standard currency of financial contracts on the blockchain,” MakerDao Head of Business Development Greg Di Prisco said on the news.
rDAI Arrives to Make cDai More Versatile
Another interesting wrinkle that’s just unfurled in the Dai ecosystem is the introduction of rDAI.
@compoundfinance v2 introduced cDAI, allowing users to have an ever appreciating asset. We took this a step further
Introducing rDAI
Always 1$, but with interestStake it, lock it up or use it for everyday payments
NEVER stops accruing interest, and direct it wherever you want
— Francesco ®enzi 🏴 (@FrancescoRenziA) August 13, 2019
Behind Maker, Compound is the second most popular DeFi lending app at present according to tracker site DeFi Pulse. Compound made “cTokens” possible in its latest v2 upgrade, which lets users lend digital assets and thus gain interest in the form of cTokens for whatever they lend — e.g. cETH for ether, cDai for Dai, and so forth.
Just by itself, that system is novel and interesting and points to the quickly widening horizons in DeFi’s corner of the cryptoeconomy. Now, the even newer rDAI is set to make cDai that much more intriguing.
Built and introduced this week by the Tallinn-based Decentral team, rDAI tokens let users easily transfer the interest gained from cDai tokens to any designated Ethereum address.
1. A user deposits DAI into the rBank and the contracts deposit the DAI into Compound to generate cDAI.
2. Instead of the user gaining a continuous interest earned from the cDAI, they generate an ERC-20 token called rDAI, that is redeemable for the original quantity of DAI.
— Peter (@pet3rpan_) August 13, 2019
As Decentral team member Francesco Renzi explained in an August 13th primer:
“rDAI is a way for contracts to monetize funds, allowing dApps to make money off deposits in a very simple way. As soon as an address gets some rDai, it start accruing interest for the designated beneficiary. On and off ramping your users by swapping DAI for rDAI is also very easy, with our mint() and redeem() functions.”
Multi-Collateral Dai Voting Now Live
To date, users have had to use ETH to collateralize their Maker CDPs to draw out Dai loans. That dynamic is set to change with the imminent introduction of Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD) system, which will let people collateralize their Dai debt positions with assets beyond ETH.
Of course, not just any old cryptocurrency is going to be allowed in. To decide which assets will be available on the launch of MCD, holders of the Maker (MKR) token were able to start voting on their picks as of August 12th.
The first assets up for the MCD vote include Golem (GNT), 0x (ZRX), OmiseGo (OMG), Augur (REP), DigixDAO (DGD), and ether.
MKR holders – Vote on the priority of ETH, BAT, DGD, GNT, OMG, REP, and ZRX in @MakerDAO's Multi-Collateral Dai system when it launches https://t.co/LFtcZ75Pd7
— DeFi Pulse 🍇 (@defipulse) August 13, 2019
The first MCD vote comes after the Maker team announced back in June that it was preparing to “initiate the late-stage tasks required to launch Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD) on Mainnet,” which included a formal audit of its smart contracts and the publication of a Risk Framework document.
In the future, the MCD can go in many directions. For example, the Fluidity team recently outlined how to tokenize off-chain assets to serve as collateral for CDPs.
The Fluidity team released a whitepaper on their 'Tokenized Asset Portfolio' design, which is essentially a system for tokenizing real securities (in this case U.S. T-Bills) as collateral for CDPs in multi-collateral daihttps://t.co/VvHHMZngys
— ₿en Sparango (@bennybitcoins) August 6, 2019
