Christensen proposes Solana fork for mainnet

MakerDAO co-founder Rune Christensen made a proposal for the project’s own network. Many popular applications operate on the Ethereum network. However, especially in the last year, we see that DeFi platforms have started to struggle to switch to their own main networks. Despite its longstanding ties to Ethereum, Christensen submitted a proposal to build MakerDAO from a fork of Solana’s codebase rather than the EVM.

It is the local chain of MakerDAO or a network now called “NewChain”. This is part of the fifth and final phase of the MakerDAO “Endgame” upgrade. The final phase is expected to take around three years to complete and we will see Maker Protocol operating on a new standalone blockchain.

Christensen argued that the Solana network would be a much better alternative for their blockchain, in a message he posted on X (Twitter) yesterday, highlighting the proposal. In his proposal on the MakerDAO forum, Christensen described Solana’s codebase as the “most promising” option to explore, giving three main reasons why he thinks it should be used as a basis for NewChain:

The Solana codebase is well designed. Blockchains see the benefits of being designed long after the bottlenecks and challenges are already well understood, which is pretty good for NewChain.

Secondly, Christensen argued that the Solana ecosystem “has proven its resilience by surviving the FTX boom and some other challenges unscathed.” Finally, Christensen noted that MakerDAO could follow a similar process to develop NewChain, as “instances already exist where the Solana codebase is forked and adapted as an application chain.”