A governance proposal to rebrand decentralized finance lending and borrowing protocol Sky back to Maker has been rejected in a vote dominated by a handful of whales.
“Sky ecosystem governance has concluded an onchain vote to continue using the Sky brand as the primary backend protocol of the ecosystem,” the DeFi protocol team stated in a post on X on Nov. 8.
It added that the decision “supports the ongoing transition from MKR to SKY and establishes Sky as the core brand.”
The governance vote was held on Nov. 4, which was recently concluded with the “Keep the Sky brand as the backend protocol brand” option prevailing, with 79% in favor, pledging 63,874 MKR.
Only 18.5% voted for recentering the Maker brand with a limited brand refresh with 14,864 MKR tokens pledged.
However, just 4 whales constituted the lion’s share of the voting power with a combined 62,452 MKR or 98% of the total for the sticking with Sky option, while one whale pledged almost all of the MKR tokens for the other option to recenter the Maker brand.
In October, the Sky community considered reverting to its original Maker name after apparent confusion and negative feedback over its August rebrand. At the time, protocol co-founder Rune Christensen proposed a discussion on the platform’s governance forum to “recenter the Maker brand,” proposing three options at the time.
Sky governance whale voting. Source: Sky governance
Earlier this week, before the vote was concluded, Framework Ventures co-founder Vance Spencer said that SKY had not yet had a chance to launch properly.
“It is not supported on any major exchanges, places like CoinGecko did not transition MKR market cap to SKY, and the rebrand timing was coincident with one large fund selling their MKR and a general market pullback,” he added before stating:
“Going with SKY - I think there is a ton of value to be unearthed by following the Endgame roadmap, but there are things that should be altered and lessons learned.”
Since the rebrand in late August, MKR prices tanked almost 50%, bottoming out at $1,100 on Nov. 6. However, since then, it has bounced back, topping $1,600 in late trading on Nov. 7 before falling to $1,476 at the time of writing.
The rebound followed a “strictly deflationary tokenomics” proposal to halt token emissions and decrease total supply from Christensen on Nov. 4.
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