Why did Vitalik sell MKR? What story lies behind it?

*Written by: 0xAyA, * Odaily Planet Daily

According to monitoring by The Data Nerd, just yesterday, Vitalik transferred 500 MKR to CoWSwap and sold it, exchanging it for 350 ETH, marking his first sale of MKR in nearly two years.

It is undeniable that MKR has shown impressive performance in a secondary market lacking liquidity, having recorded a 124% increase since its low point on June 10, and the price has not completely deteriorated. What could be the reason for Vitalik choosing to sell MKR at this time? What story lies behind it?

A Choice Forced by Endgame

On September 1, MakerDao founder Rune posted on the forum to discuss the fifth phase of the project roadmap codenamed "Endgame"—the final phase, which involves completely re-implementing the entire Maker protocol and deploying it on a new chain called NewChain. Once deployed, MakerDAO will permanently enter Endgame status, with no further significant changes, and its core processes and power balance will remain decentralized, self-sustainable, and unchanged forever.

However, it is intriguing that after Rune "studied all options," he made a "not difficult decision": to trust Solana. Rune listed three reasons for choosing Solana:

First, the technical quality of the Solana codebase, as it is highly optimized for operating a single, efficient blockchain, which is exactly what NewChain needs. The Solana codebase is well-designed and was created long after the bottlenecks and challenges of blockchain were fully understood, aligning well with NewChain's goals in addressing Maker's technical debt. Solana also already has two clients, which is crucial for resilience.

Second, the Solana ecosystem survived the FTX explosion, proving the resilience of public chains. Despite all the issues and difficulties, the project still has a thriving developer community. This means it has a significant Lindy effect and may exist for the long term, which implies that the costs of development and maintenance will be greatly reduced, and there will always be a high-quality talent pool available for Maker to access and contribute.

The third reason is that there are already examples of the Solana codebase being forked and adjusted for application chains. Notably, the Pyth project runs its own Solana-adapted version as its backend.

Interestingly, Rune also mentioned Cosmos as an alternative, but he also stated that "Cosmos is not built around efficiency like Solana, which means the costs of maintaining and sustaining performance will be higher," while public chains like Aptos and Sui are "simply not suitable."

Reactions Inside and Outside the Community

The replies to Rune's post may represent the thoughts of most onlookers who read this grand article: "Please tell me you're joking…"

In fact, many people left comments below the post to express their opinions, with some asking how much time was spent researching this decision and whether there is detailed technical documentation to support this choice. More people began to debate whether Solana or other chains are suitable for NewChain, and one person directly refuted Rune's viewpoint:

"The most important reason for needing NewChain is that it allows the ecosystem to gracefully recover from the most severe governance attacks or technical failures through hard forks."

------Let's move to a less secure chain to prevent governance attacks (clown emoji).

"The second reason is that the Solana ecosystem has proven its resilience."

------Everything will be fine, all past downtimes have indeed proven its 'paralysis.'

"The third reason is that there are already examples of the Solana codebase being forked and adjusted for application chains."

------There are already examples of aggregated codebases being forked and adjusted to serve as application chains.

Just delete the post; you are a joke.

Vitalik's response was even more direct: selling MKR. The monitored address on the chain became the clearest voice.

Star Projects, Starting Anew

In fact, many star projects have the vision of "going independent" and starting their own application chains to solve various problems they face after development. For example, Axie Infinity chose to build its own game sidechain, Ronin, after its explosive growth, sacrificing validation nodes for faster transfer speeds, enabling millions of on-chain game interactions; dYdX faced the issue of competing for network resources with many other projects after its ecosystem developed, which is intolerable for on-chain trading exchanges, so it chose to build a new chain on Cosmos to further ensure the protocol's settlement speed and decentralization.

Rune and MakerDao are not the first to propose building their own application chains— for projects that have grown and gained independent voice and funding, defecting from the "mother chain" has become an unavoidable topic, and public chains seem to always be the helpless party in this situation.

However, for Vitalik, at least MKR has increased significantly.