Maker Foundation Denies Participation in Its Debt Auctions

MakerDAO (MKR) had rejected accusations that the Maker Foundation was the one to place the winning bids in all of its recent debt auctions.

The Maker Foundation stated that it “is not purchasing MKR in the auctions.”

Maker Foundation offers “limited technical support to some bidders”

“Similar to how the Foundation created the Auction UI,” the foundation asserts that “it has offered limited technical assistance to some bidders on a first come, first serve basis to facilitate their timely and effective participation in the auctions.”

The statement provided by Maker Foundation asserts that the assistance “in no way provides informational or any other advantage to those bidders, including capital.”

Crypto crash forces MakerDAO debt auction

MakerDAO is the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol underpinning the stablecoin Dai (DAI) which are created when a user enters a collateralized debt position.

With a large number of these loans being taken against Ethereum (ETH), the recent crypto market crash led to $4.5 million worth of loans becoming under-collateralized, which forced Maker’s first-ever debt auction.

The data shows that on the debt auctions bidders pledged 500,000 DAI “lots” to bid on 40 batches of freshly created MKR tokens — with the funds used to balance Maker Foundation’s debt. The starting bid for each lot was 250 MKR, with each next bid decreasing by a minimum of 3%.

The debt auctions conducted by Maker Foundation helped raise 2 million DAI from 25 unique bidders with an average price of 269.3 MKR per lot.