The past year has been one of fantastic growth for MakerDAO. Dai continues to be widely respected across the cryptosphere and has become a core part of the #DeFi movement, with hundreds of projects integrating it. At the same time, there has been an encouraging and thoughtful commitment to decentralized governance across the ecosystem. From engagement in our weekly governance calls and discussions in chat forums to participation in governance votes, we are excited to see increasing participation from the growing Maker Community.

To help continue expanding the Maker ecosystem, the Maker Ecosystem Growth Foundation (MEGF) was created. The MEGF controls a fund of MKR tokens that facilitate the adoption of the decentralized MakerDAO protocol. Just as innovation is key to how the Maker project builds new and better ways to level the economic playing field for people around the world, MEGF works to create a structure that is true to the spirit of the organization.

At the end of 2018, MEGF created a board. Though the term “board” may conjure up images of a formal corporate structure, the MEGF board was a bit different. It was made up of nine technical members, who were responsible for ensuring the security of the MEGF’s development funds in a multi-sig. Think of a multi-sig like a bank account with a number of signatories, a subgroup of whom are needed to sign before a transaction could take place. We chose technical individuals for this task, believing they would be best positioned to secure the multi-sig and ensure the soundness of each transaction.

But, due to the project’s rapid growth and the number of projects across the world building on top of MakerDAO, it became clear that the MEGF board required expertise beyond the ability to evaluate technical contributions and maintain the security of the funds. Just as traditional boards benefit from executive and operational expertise, including how to scale an organization and deal with regulatory, compliance, and other non-technical challenges, so would this one.

Because of this, we are looking to reconstitute the MEGF board in a way that will not only ensure the representation of a decentralized community of stakeholders (including technical contributors and security experts), but also borrow elements from traditional board structures, including independent directors. As part of this process, we will carefully and deliberately review the ideal MEGF board structure in the coming weeks, and will solicit input from a variety of stakeholders along the way: partners, developers, community members, token holders, governance experts, and others.

As the first step in this process, the technical board described above will be transitioned into a committee of the newly-constituted MEGF board, and will continue to evaluate the technical contributions to the project and safeguard the MEGF treasury moving forward. We thank all board members, past and present, for their service. We also envision a grant committee to help evaluate, vote on, and fund projects that facilitate adoption of MakerDAO. Other committees will also be considered.

Transparency is a fundamental pillar of how the Maker Ecosystem Growth Foundation envisions its relationship with the wider community. As we committed to in earlier announcements, we plan to publish data and reports on a wide range of topics, including strategy, financials, partnerships, growth metrics, and team makeup, as well as to providing technical status and roadmap updates, as soon as we can do this without negatively impacting our top priority: the launch of Multi-Collateral Dai.

We believe in the power of MakerDAO to build a more open and inclusive financial system. To get there, we need to build further on our foundation structure and ensure that it continues to be transparent and representative. In doing so, we hope to make the project more resilient and efficient as we prepare to launch Multi-Collateral Dai.

