Brand restructuring leads to confusion prompting Makers founder to consider reverting the name

CoinList reported:
It has been a month since the upgrade, and only 10% of the tokens have been migrated.
Written by: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily


On September 18th, the well-known DeFi leader Maker officially completed its rebranding and transformation, renaming itself as Sky and launching the token migration from MKR to SKY and from DAI to USDS.
After more than a month, perhaps due to the fact that the original Maker brand had already been deeply rooted in people’s minds and that the MKR and DAI tokens had already accumulated a wide range of applications, the migration process to the new brand and tokens does not seem to be going smoothly.
According to Dune data, as of the time of writing, about 900 million DAI tokens, accounting for approximately 15.5% of the total supply of DAI (5.8 billion tokens), have been migrated to USDS. Additionally, about 91,880 MKR tokens, accounting for only 10.6% of the circulating supply of MKR (868,478 tokens), have been migrated to SKY.


At the same time, many users in the community have expressed confusion about the utility of the new tokens under the new brand (such as Seal), their functions (such as Activation), the supply situation (such as the Early Bird airdrop), and the ecological positioning (such as the relationship with various Stars like Spark). They believe that the rebranding of the brand has instead blurred the protocol’s positioning and negatively affected the consensus within the community.
Looking at the price trend, the market is also not enthusiastic about Maker’s upgrade, especially considering that well-established DeFi protocols like Aave and Uniswap have recently had impressive performances of varying lengths. The price of MKR (which can still reflect the protocol’s market value as it has a fixed exchange ratio with SKY) has been declining.


Last night, perhaps realizing that the rebranding was not successful enough, Maker founder Rune Christensen published a long post on his personal social media, discussing the possibility of reverting the brand back to Maker…
Regarding the “information confusion” in the community, Rune said, “Using Sky as the name for the protocol, token, and front-end has indeed caused some confusion. Now we are more clear than ever about the DeFi community’s love for the Maker brand. Users still trust this brand and what it represents in terms of stability and security… Many people still promise to hold MKR instead of upgrading to SKY.”
In this regard, Rune outlined his preliminary ideas for restarting the Maker brand. In short, Rune hopes to position Maker as the decentralized back-end protocol and Sky as the front-end DeFi product based on Maker. Under this framework:
Maker will continue to serve as the decentralized back-end protocol supporting USDS, DAI, and various StarDAOs, and MKR will remain the sole governance token of Maker. The community can decide whether to maintain the original image of the Maker brand or redesign it.
Sky will serve as the front-end directly serving DeFi users. In terms of positioning, Sky will be on par with Spark, both being front-end applications based on the Maker protocol, but with different focuses – Sky will focus only on the minting/redeeming of the USDS stablecoin, while Spark will be a lending market that requires collateral management.
Under this framework, USDS will not change and will still be supported by Maker and MKR for governance.
It can be seen that Rune now wants to retain the new brand Sky while also not wanting to give up the influence accumulated by the Maker brand… In this envisioning, the only thing Rune did not mention is seemingly the new governance token SKY, as if Rune wants to use MKR to replace the utility of SKY.


After explaining his own ideas, Rune also mentioned that he hopes the community can vote on the potential of restarting the Maker brand. Several proposed options are as follows:
Option 1: Continue to use Sky as the core brand and adhere to the latest branding upgrade strategy.
Option 2: Restart Maker with the original image as the core brand and restore MKR as the sole governance token for DAO.
Option 3: Reactivate the Maker brand with a new image, maintaining the classic design of the original brand but making minor modifications to better “align” with USDS and various Stars.
Rune emphasized that the restoration of the Maker brand is currently only in the preliminary idea stage and that it will take some time for the community to fully discuss it. A community conference call is planned for October 25th. After the community conference call, Rune will consolidate all feedback and advance the issue to a community vote (which will require multiple rounds). The proposed vote is scheduled to begin on October 28th and if approved, the multiple choice vote will be implemented within a week starting from November 4th.
Throughout the development history of the cryptocurrency industry, brand restructuring is not uncommon, but it is rare for a project like Maker to “completely abandon a highly reputable original brand and then want to change it back.” Odaily Planet Daily will continue to follow the latest developments of this event and provide timely reports.