MakerDAO Eyes Adding Gemini and Binance USD as Collateral

Maker (MKR) holders have voted to prioritize adding Gemini USD, Binance USD, and several other tokens as collateral assets to the Maker DAO protocol so those tokens can be used to generate DAI stablecoins.

As a result, Maker "Domain Teams"—elected community members—will analyze these tokens and determine whether or not the protocol can handle them before the community takes a final vote to accept or reject them as collateral assets.

According to the Maker white paper, protocol users can put up Ethereum-based digital assets as collateral in order to generate Dai. Users can then use the Dai stablecoin like they would any other cryptocurrency—or lock it into a smart contract as savings.

Maker governance is highly intricate, but the basics are this: Two weeks ago, Maker's Governance Facilitators polled users about 11 tokens that could be added to the Maker Protocol, including Gemini USD and Binance USD.

According to Maker's blog, a yes vote would "be taken as a signal to domain teams that MKR Token Holders have approved further domain work with the aim of adding GUSD (Gemini USD) as a collateral asset to the Maker Protocol."

By the time the vote ended today, 11 voters had put up 20,207.58 MKR to vote yes for Gemini. There were zero no votes, meaning the project now has the initial green light from the community to be onboarded. Binance USD also go the go-ahead, with nine voters expressing their approval to the tune of nearly 30,000 MKR.

GUSD and BUSD were just two of the tokens that voters approved to move forward today. Community members also gave thumbs-ups to TrueGBP, TrueAUD, TrueCAD, Ren, Huobi Global BTC, UniswapV2 USDC-ETH Liquidity Token, New Silver DROP, and Harbor Trade Credit DROP. (Not everything got pushed through. The Maker community voted to defer the inclusion of Chi Gastoken.)

But it's not certain that Gemini or these other coins will get added anytime soon.

"Just because an asset has passed a greenlight does not necessarily indicate it will become a collateral type in the Maker Protocol," MakerDAO Head of Backend Services Nik Kunkel told Decrypt. First, it has to go through a "thorough review by the [elected] Domain Teams in areas such as risk, oracles, and smart contracts to ensure the protocol can handle them in a secure manner."

When MakerDAO launched, users could only use Ethereum as collateral. Earlier this year, however, Maker transitioned from Single-Collateral Dai to Multi-Collateral DAI, opening the door for users to propose and approve new Ethereum-based tokens as collateral.

Aside from Ether, the current list of approved collateral tokens includes the Basic Attention Token (BAT), USD Coin (USDC), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), TrueUSD (TUSD), Kyber Network (KNC), 0x (ZRX), and Mana (MANA).