MakerDAO community greenlights first 'real-world' assets for use as collateral

The MakerDAO community has taken a key step toward letting people use tokenized trade invoices and music streaming royalties as collateral for stablecoin loans.

A community vote has signaled strong support for two new collateral on-boarding proposals spearheaded by a startup called Centrifuge, which has developed a protocol that lets users turn real assets into securities against which interest-bearing ERC20 tokens can be issued. Centrifuge has teamed with Paperchain and ConsolFreight to tokenize music streaming royalties and trade invoices, respectively.

The vote, which concluded today, paves the way for these tokens to be used as collateral for minting Dai stablecoins.

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Paperchain and ConsolFreight’s tokens would be the first collateral type that isn’t crypto-native. Currently MakerDAO accepts ETH, Basic Attention Tokens, Wrapped Bitcoin and USDC as collateral for Dai loans. The new vote also signaled community support for 0x’s ZRX token, Decentraland’s MANA token, tBTC and Uniswap’s Dai Liquidity Token.

Centrifuge and its partners will now get to work figuring which oracles to use, developing risk models and reviewing smart contract security, Centrifuge CEO Lucas Vogelsang told The Block in an email. He estimated that these steps will take somewhere between a few weeks and a couple of months.

Once that work is done, a second, binding vote will be held to determine whether to add the new code to the smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain.

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Mike is a Senior Editor at The Block. Previously he was a senior reporter at MIT Technology Review, where he covered a range of topics from solar cells to smart contracts.