Richard Heart pokes MakerDAO to ‘do the funniest thing’ and rug-pull

By admin On Mar 26, 2025

Hex founder and Europol fugitive Richard Heart has accused the Maker Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) of failing basic tests of decentralization and autonomy.

In a note concluding a long rant against a bridged version of MakerDAO’s flagship stablecoin, DAI, Heart chuckled that MakerDAO administrators have powers to override community votes or borrow barely-collateralized tokens.

He prodded admins to finally exercise their authority to rug-pull the project and “do the funniest thing.”

On the Ethereum blockchain, MakerDAO’s stablecoin DAI has traded near its intended $1 peg for many years. However, a copy of the MakerDAO and its DAI stablecoin on the Richard Heart-founded blockchain Pulsechain, pDAI, has crashed to near $0.

Pulsechain-based DAI crashes to near $0

For context, Pulsechain is a modified version of Ethereum that copied over all of its tokens and projects as of a snapshot date. Ethereum-based projects like Uniswap and Compound each have an unauthorized clone of themselves running on Pulsechain.

In a string of tweets, Heart shared pDAI’s embarrassing $400,000 worth of liquidity on swap markets between Pulsechain and Ethereum. That pales in comparison to the $3.2 billion market capitalization of DAI on Ethereum.

Heart questioned whether insiders at MakerDAO even knew that Pulsechain-based pDAI or pMKR tokens even existed. If they did, he joked, they also control the Pulsechain-based MakerDAO.

That pDAI has failed to maintain its intended $1 peg, despite cross-blockchain swap markets, indicates that MakerDAO might be an immature project that still requires active intervention by humans.

Making his view clear, Heart called the stablecoin “bugged, risk-laden, exploited, and fake.”

Pushing MakerDAO admins to reveal their true power

Heart offered relatively little evidence that MakerDAO’s administrators could (or would) “do the funniest thing” and rug-pull their Pulsechain clone. As early as 2020, for its part, MakerDAO claimed to have eliminated admin keys altogether.

Of course, the same key-burning ceremony supposedly occurred at UniSwap, but that doesn’t mean that Maker or UniSwap are fully controlled by their community. Famously, Uniswap insiders have decided to delist tokens from its front end without community input, censored voting issues from reaching a formal voting phase, and delayed the implementation of certain votes from its community.

DAOs also tend to centralize around venture capitalists who dominate voting outcomes, or centralized exchange executives who have the power to use their customers’ tokens to vote.

Not the first critique of MakerDAO’s dubious decentralization

MakerDAO decentralization has its own history of controversy. Founder Rune Christensen, known by some as a “Mad King,” once wildly promised to de-peg the DAI stablecoin.

Christensen rebranded MakerDAO to Sky Protocol and pivoted from its non-yield-bearing DAI to yield-bearing USDS. Christensen initially waved off concerns about the rebranding, yet just a few months later, indicated that he might be willing to consider bringing back the MakerDAO brand.

Heart has accused MakerDAO (or Sky Protocol) of having the power to control the Pulsechain version of DAI or MKR.

Heart’s critique of MakerDAO highlights ongoing debates about the decentralization and autonomy of DAOs. Meanwhile, his own projects like Pulsechain face idiosyncratic challenges like the pricing collapse of pDAI.

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