As the MakerDAO project continues to advance and its flagship tokens, Dai and MKR, grow in popularity, the specter of Maker governance votes is rising too.

Accordingly, cryptocurrency custodian firm Anchorage has launched a new voting portal for its institutional MKR holders to readily have their say in the major DeFi project’s future.

Announced by Anchorage on October 24th, the new Anchorage Governance service will begin with MKR support but will eventually expand to support other cryptocurrency projects with on-chain governance, like EOS and Tezos.

Among other things, MKR governance votes are routinely held to determine the Dai Stability Fee, which is the interest charged to users who take out automated Dai stablecoin loans using the Maker lending dApp.

Notably, the new Anchorage portal comes just in time for what will arguably be the biggest governance vote yet in the Maker ecosystem, the vote for the Multi-Collateral Dai (MCD) system scheduled for November 15th. If approved, MCD will allow users to take out automated Dai loans using cryptocurrencies beyond just ether (ETH), the native token of the Ethereum blockchain.

And it won’t be small fish voting through Anchorage Governance, either. Counting top companies like Visa and Andreesen Horowitz among its investors, the crypto custodian firm caters to institutional investors who deal with sizable holdings in general.

For example, Andreesen Horowitz — which made waves in the cryptoverse last year in spending $15 million USD to buy up 6 percent of the MKR token supply — uses Anchorage’s custody services and thus will now be able to put those governance tokens into action easily.

“Given Anchorage clients’ significant Maker holdings, we expect this new feature to have a meaningful impact on future voter turnout,” the Anchorage team said on the news.

Indeed, the move has already proven popular with some of Anchorage’s clients. ParaFi Capital Principal Kevin Yedid-Botton commented on Thursday:

“As an activist firm and institutional Maker stakeholder, it is our duty to participate in governance decisions that affect the DeFi ecosystem and digital credit markets. Anchorage is advancing institutional participation across the board, and now offers a seamless user experience for secure on-chain Maker governance.”

Custody Division of Coinbase Launched Its Own Portal This Month

If Anchorage’s entry to the governance field is any indication, the race for this new kind of infrastructure is on.

Beating them to the punch was the similarly institutionally-minded Coinbase Custody, which rolled out support for MKR governance votes on October 11th.

The exchange specifically highlighted how the new service marked a vast improvement over the experience institutional investors had previously had to endure when it came to crypto votes:

“To date, crypto asset managers have been forced to withdraw their funds from 3rd-party custodians to participate in on-chain governance. This has kept many would-be voters on the sidelines as these potential participants need to avoid the risk of moving assets or first-party voting solutions. Starting today, we now support our clients with the industry’s first, fully integrated governance solution that works directly out of offline storage.”

As a Libra Member, Expect to Hear More About Anchorage

The Libra Association, which governs Facebook’s proposed Libra stablecoin project, ran its first 21-member council meeting earlier this month. As one of the association’s members, Anchorage was present and participated alongside other big name members like Lyft, Spotify, and Uber.

Interestingly, Anchorage’s presence in the body fostered a rare sign of support from a U.S. lawmaker at a time when legislators around the world have been blasting the potential overreaches of the Libra effort.

In a letter sent to Anchorage last week, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said he commended the stablecoin project’s scope.

“It would be unfortunate to shun a new solution that could connect more of the most vulnerable Americans to our financial services system,” the congressman wrote.