Rune Christensen Is Making Digital Assets Real

Rune Christensen is the co-founder of MakerDAO, one of the oldest and largest decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platforms and issuer of the $5 billion dai (DAI) stablecoin.

This year, Christensen, a native of Denmark and graduate of the University of Copenhagen, set out to shake Maker up from its foundations in his grandiose plan called "Endgame." While his plan was initially met with pushback along with accusations of tyranny in an ostensible decentralized organization, the strategy started to pay dividends this year – literally.

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2023. For the full list, click here.

His initiative to integrate old-school assets like U.S. government bonds into a blockchain-native protocol was a trendsetter and spearheaded the real-world asset (RWA) movement, now one of the hottest topics in crypto. It also fueled Maker's turnaround, allowing it to rake in profits at a time when a bitter crypto winter weighed heavily on lending protocols as many crypto traders turned their back on DeFi.

And this was only the beginning. The next step will be to revamp Maker's clunky organization with the introduction of SubDAOs and prove decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) can work. Perhaps this should be no surprise: In 2020, a year Christensen topped CoinDesk’s Most Influential list, he announced he would dissolve the Maker Foundation, the centralized organization he founded and led to develop the Maker protocol.

That was the second time Christensen ceded control of a business he started in order to follow his interests. Christensen previously ran an EU-based company that helped bring people to China to teach English, which he sold to invest in bitcoin (BTC). The idea for dai came after the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2014, as the foundation for a potentially more stable and transparent financial system.

We reached out to Christensen to ask him how he sees 2023 and what’s in store for next year.

Biggest achievement this past year?

"Figuring out how to do real-world assets at scale and deploying $2.5 billion into Treasuries, which now has led to profits exceeding $90 million per year."

What’s your No. 1 goal for 2024?

"Maker is going through this huge overhaul called End Game and that begins with the rebrand [of Maker and DAI], the biggest thing for us that's going to happen next year."

Give us a prediction for crypto next year.

Mass adoption of RWAs. "You will look back at this moment as when the entire financial system started migrating to blockchain."