Sky — the protocol formerly known as MakerDAO — is one of the oldest and largest DAOs in DeFi. It governs the issuance of decentralized, crypto-and-real-world-asset-collateralized stablecoins and is widely regarded as the original DeFi DAO, the project that proved a community could run a multi-billion-dollar monetary system through on-chain governance.

DAI: the first decentralized stablecoin

MakerDAO launched DAI in 2017, the first widely-adopted stablecoin not backed by a centralized issuer's bank account but minted against on-chain collateral and held near $1 by an autonomous system of vaults, liquidations, and a governance-set stability fee. MKR holders governed every parameter — collateral types, fees, debt ceilings — making Maker the canonical demonstration of decentralized monetary governance. (Sky / Maker documentation)

Endgame and the rebrand to Sky

In May 2022, co-founder Rune Christensen published Endgame, a multi-year plan to restructure the monolithic protocol into a modular network of semi-autonomous subDAOs. On 27 August 2024 the project rebranded from MakerDAO to Sky, introducing new tokens: the MKR governance token migrates to SKY at a 1:24,000 ratio, and DAI gains a sibling, USDS, that holders can optionally upgrade to. (The Block)

The protocol today

By early 2026 the combined supply of DAI and USDS sits around $13 billion, with USDS having overtaken DAI in raw size. The collateral mix has shifted heavily toward real-world assets — roughly 40% short-term U.S. treasuries allocated through "Star" allocators, around a third USDC via the peg-stability module, and the balance in crypto — so that real-world-asset revenue now supplies the majority of protocol income, a near-complete inversion of its crypto-native origins. The Endgame "Stars" launch as subDAOs with their own tokens and governance; the first live Star, Spark (its own DAO page) — a lending market built on Sky liquidity — has grown past $3 billion in deposits (live figure on DeFiLlama). (Sky governance forum)

Why it matters

Sky is the longest-running test of whether a DAO can manage a large, risk-bearing balance sheet — making it a continual reference point for DAO treasury management: diversification into yield-bearing real-world assets, governance-set rates, and the trade-off between decentralization and the operational discipline a multi-billion-dollar treasury demands.

How Caper approaches this

Sky shows both the promise and the weight of a community-run treasury, and it is also the closest thing in this directory to a working precedent for how a caper executes — close enough that the two systems have landed on the same number.

Sky's pipeline has two stages, and the second is a delay. Executive voting in the Chief is continuous approval voting: SKY is locked behind candidate spells, and the spell holding the most weight — “the hat” — is the one that may be cast. The Chief migrated to a SKY-denominated contract in the 15 May 2025 spell; read at 0x929d…a6f9 on 6 September 2026 the sitting hat carried 7,052,257,051 SKY in approvals. Passing is not executing, though. A cast spell goes into the Governance Security Module and cannot act until the pause delay elapses — delay() on MCD_PAUSE returns 172,800 seconds, the 48 hours governance voted for in 2023 — and in that gap holders can lift a different hat or, in extremis, trigger emergency shutdown.

A caper's second stage is a window too, and it is not a delay. A caper proposal first clears a ranked ballot, which is legislative only. Triggering the winning action then locks the caper's trailing TWAP as a baseline and opens the market window – its length is PROPOSAL_WINDOW_SECONDS, a logic constant set to drill tuning on the current Stokenet deployment – and the action executes if and only if the TWAP measured across that window is at or above the baseline. Sky spends its 48 hours waiting for a challenge that has to be organised in SKY; a caper spends its window measuring, and the challenge is a trade anyone can make alone. Both are optimistic governance: a decision that stands unless stopped. They differ in who has standing to stop it — a rival coalition versus any seller — and therefore in what a quiet window means. Sky's silence is nobody organising; a caper's silence is nobody selling.

The rest is scale. A caper raises through an on-chain bonding curve into a vault no single party can spend, and members keep a direct claim on it at exit — a redemption right Sky answers only through the far heavier machinery of emergency shutdown. The Caper pages describe those mechanics without the subDAO complexity.

References

• Sky — official site.
• Sky Governance Forum.
• The Block — MakerDAO rebrands to Sky; DAI optionally upgradeable to USDS.