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USDS is doing great. However, the SKY governance token… not so much.
It’s been roughly two months since Maker announced Sky’s rebrand and the team is now mulling a U-turn.
Maker first announced its Sky rebrand at the end of August and launched on 24 September. The rebranding was intended for holders of the original MKR governance token to convert into the new SKY governance token at an exchange rate of 1 to 24,000.
Since launch, only about 10.7% of MKR token holders have migrated to the new SKY governance token.
The adoption of USDS was received relatively more positively, with its market capitalization rising to $1.26 billion.
Rune Christensen, co-founder of Maker, tweeted: “It is also now clearer than ever how much the DeFi community loves and trusts the Maker brand… there is a greater commitment to keeping the MKR token rather than upgrading to SKY.”
As Christensen explained, on October 28, the Maker team will have three voting options:
- Continue to use Sky as your core brand.
- Make a complete turnaround to the original Maker brand.
- Go back to the original Maker branding, but update it slightly “to better align it with USDS and StarDAO.”
The denomination of tokens with a large number of tokens from MKR to SKY has been widely perceived by many as some kind of positive psychological catalyst that plays on what is commonly called “unit bias.”
The idea here is that investors may find MKR less attractive due to its high price – over $1,000 per MKR – while SKY’s significantly lower price of a few cents (due to the higher total supply of tokens) makes its more psychologically attractive to retailers. investors should hold versus fractional amounts of MKR.
Yesterday, Christensen admitted on X-Space that this denomination strategy “clearly didn’t work” after the SKY token failed to list on centralized exchanges.
To drive this transformation, Sky planned to offer “print rewards” and “activation rewards” to token holders who chose to stake SKY – features that Christensen now calls “hard to track” amid a series of new features based on feedback communities.
X’s critics wasted no time in blasting Maker for spending $50 million on a failed rebrand.
In response, Christensen admitted on yesterday’s X-Space that the criticism was a “funny meme” and while he “doesn’t blame people for using it as a slam dunk,” the entire amount of money wasn’t spent solely on “rebranding.”
Christensen clarified that the value of the rebrand was to increase demand for the USDS stablecoin and the importance of introducing a product that has shown success so far.
Following the Sky rebrand, the team embarked on a series of high-profile launches, such as integrating USDS with Aave (dubbed Sky Aave Force), as well as launching USDS for Solana and other Ethereum L2s.
