Rune Christensen

Rune Christensen is a Danish entrepreneur and the co-founder of MakerDAO, the protocol behind DAI — the first decentralized stablecoin and one of the foundational building blocks of the DeFi ecosystem. MakerDAO launched on Ethereum's mainnet in December 2017, years before "DeFi" became a recognized category. Christensen studied biochemistry and international business in Copenhagen before discovering Ethereum in its early days. He recognized that decentralized finance would need a stable unit of account that didn't rely on a bank holding dollars in reserve. MakerDAO's solution was DAI: a stablecoin backed by overcollateralized crypto assets locked in smart contracts called "Vaults." If collateral values fell below safety thresholds, the system automatically liquidated positions to protect the peg. The single-collateral DAI system (backed only by ETH) launched in 2017. Multi-Collateral DAI (MCD) followed in 2019, accepting a broader range of assets and introducing the DAI Savings Rate. The system weathered the March 2020 crash, the 2021 bull market, and the 2022 bear market — maintaining its peg through conditions that destroyed algorithmic alternatives like UST. DAI consistently ranked among the top three decentralized stablecoins by market cap. In 2023, Christensen proposed "Endgame" — a radical restructuring of MakerDAO into SubDAOs with specialized functions, a rebranding to "Sky Protocol," and a new token (SKY) replacing MKR. The plan divided the community but reflected Christensen's willingness to reinvent his own creation. His legacy is establishing that trustless, overcollateralized stablecoins can work at scale — a proof of concept that shaped every stablecoin design that followed.