MakerDAO, a Santa Cruz, California-based financial services firm focused on the development of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) on the Ethereum blockchain, currently has $334.9 million in ether locked in its lending contracts.

This, according to data from DeFi Pulse, which shows that Maker’s dominance of the decentralized finance (DeFi) market presently stands at 83%.

The Dai stablecoin, which is part of the MakerDAO lending ecosystem, has been trading below (and slightly above) the $1 mark – even though it’s pegged 1:1 to the USD. However, Dai is still in a “stable” position – according to MakerDAO’s community members.

MakerDAO’s Token Holders Vote To Increase Stability Fee, Again

Over the past three months, MakerDAO’s Stability Fee has increased as much as 33x as it went from 0.5% to its current 16.5%. Recently, MakerDAO token holders decided to again raise the Stability Fee by 3%, which means it would increase to 19.5%.

Steven Becker, the President and Chief Operations Officer (COO) at the MakerDAO Foundation, posted recent meeting minutes on Reddit (on May 2, 2019) – which recapped a discussion among the lending platform’s members regarding governance and risk.

Becker, a Financial Mathematics postgraduate from the University of Cape Town, mentioned: 

In using the Stability Fee, progress has been made…the peg is stable, just a few percentage [points] below where it needs to be.

Over the past few months, MakerDAO token holders have been voting to increase the Stability Fee, in order to make it more expensive to take out loans in Dai. As the main lending platform for Dai, MakerDAO’s investors have been in favor of increasing the Stability Fee because they are attempting to retract Dai’s market supply. This could help the stablecoin’s price stabilize at the $1 mark.

According to Richard Brown, the Head of Core Community at MakerDAO, the crypto lending platform’s investors will cast a secondary vote today (May 3, 2019). After MakerDAO’s community members vote, the Stability Fee of the programmatic lending system may be increased.

Cryptos Other Than Ether To Be Added To MakerDAO’s Lending Ecosystem

In addition to holding over $300 million in ether, the developers of the MakerDAO ecosystem intend to integrate other cryptocurrencies into the platform’s decentralized lending system. Other digital assets will reportedly be added (and referred to as “multi-collateral Dai”) to MakerDAO’s contracts after a system-wide upgrade has been performed.

Currently, Dai is fully backed only by ether, and it also has a fixed (or maximum) supply of 100 million