The office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, a famed foe of cryptocurrency, got MakerDAO mixed up with a failed experiment in decentralized autonomous organizations back in 2016. MakerDAO is among the top 10 DeFi protocols.
‘Concerning’ lack of familiarity with present-day DeFi
According to comments from MakerDAO developers, the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren has demonstrated a rather worrying lack of familiarity with the present-day decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. On Monday, September 20, social media users began circulating a screenshot which seemed to show elements of a dialogue between MakerDAO community members. They were commenting the conclusions from a recent meeting between the senator’s office and representatives of the project.
Maker vs. the disaster that was The DAO
The screenshot shows one delegate claiming to have spent a long time convincing Elizabeth Warren that The DAO and Maker are two different projects. At the moment, MakerDAO is the sixth-biggest DeFi protocol with over $8.2 billion in total locked value. The delegate reached the conclusion that Warren wasn’t particularly interested in them. However, they added that there would be another meeting in about three weeks.
One of the first major projects to be launched on Ethereum, The DAO became fact after raising $150 million in ETH through a token sale in 2016. Its code vulnerabilities led to its being hacked. Within less than three months of the launch, $60 million in ETH was stolen.
Failed efforts to establish dialogue with legislators
There is some confusion as to whether MakerDAO’s team met with Senator Warren directly or with her economic and banking advisors. Either way, the meeting comes after a largely failed effort from MakerDAO to establishing dialogue with lawmakers.
Elizabeth Warren is a notable pariah to the digital asset industry, labeling cryptocurrencies as a “lousy investment” and “the new shadow bank” in recent months.
Earlier this month she suggested:
“It would be worth considering prohibiting U.S. banks from holding the reserves to back private stablecoins in a move that could effectively end the surging market.”
The DAO is still one of the crypto projects that attracted the biggest investment in history. It drew 14% of all ETH in circulation at the time. After the lack, the Ethereum community voted for the ETH hard fork to reverse the damage. Dissenters held on to the old chain, which became Ethereum Classic. The new Ethereum is the cryptocurrency with the second biggest market cap and is available for purchase on quite a number of exchanges.
