Wyre Talks

Ep 19, MakerDAO, Novel Paradigms for Risk Management with Steven Becker, President and COO

Episode Summary

In this week episode of Wyre Talks, we welcome Steven Becker the COO of MakerDAO. Steven shares his thoughts on new risk management challenges presented by Maker's stablecoin model.

Episode Notes

In this Wyre Talks, we are excited to host Steven Becker COO and President of MakerDAO. Having spent his career at various trading desks on Wall Street banks and high stakes hedge funds, Steven is no stranger to managing risk. However, a new challenge arose as he was tapped to run the decentralized risk functions at MakerDAO. Steven grasped the problem and led the decentralized organization scale and survive the downturn, all while preparing for the launch of MultiCollateral Dai -- the most intricate risk management problem.

MakerDAO is many things, but it can be thought of colloquially as a decentralized central bank or more precisely as a decentralized credit facility. Maker is governed by their token holders who vote to implement the risk management around the collateral that backs their stablecoin, Dai. With decentralization center plate and a battle-tested Single Collateral Dai system, Maker is poised to make the jump into additional collateral types. We’re excited to continue rooting on their journey into riskier waters as the world’s only truly decentralized stablecoin.

• An overview of the MakerDAO ecosystem components and how they
  motivate stability.
• How the diverse range of MKR holders coordinates to govern the
  various risk verticals of the MakerDAO system.
• How liquidations are an essential part of the economic ecosystem that
  Maker is creating.
• Inherent systemic risks of the DeFi platform that participants should
  be mindful of.
• The primary objectives and motivations behind the launch of the Multi
  Collateral Dai.
• How adding additional collateral to the Maker platform presents a new
  risk management problem set.
• Maker’s measured approach to growing the acceptable collateral assets
  and subsequently their debt ceiling.
• How Maker will measure non-quantifiable risks like counterparty risk
  & legal risk for new collateral assets.
• How the Maker team focuses their go-to-market and partnerships
  efforts.
• Maker’s opinion of the other stablecoin models
• How Maker is thinking through the oracle problem.

You can follow the hosts on Twitter! 

Thomas Scaria (host): @tomscaria

Louis Aboud (co-host): @louAboudHogben