finance. But by last year, she says, she felt qualified enough, and
bored enough, to take advantage of an opportunity that arose to
join MakerDAO. Schap worked in business development, and
what began as a jack-of-all-trades job soon morphed into a singu-
lar focus on delivering the most ambitious phase of the project:
creating a stablecoin backed by multiple types of collateral. She
says she worked on finding partners that could supply collateral
to the MakerDAO system.
MakerDAO’s stablecoin, Dai, is pegged to the dollar and, in
its current iteration, backed by the cryptocurrency Ether. There
were $85 million worth of Dai in circulation as of Sept. 19. Launched
in late 2017, Dai was one of the first of what’s become a flurry of
virtual currencies designed to avoid large price swings.
Stablecoins like Dai can be used as a hedge against volatil-
ity. Ether peaked at more than $1,400 each at the beginning of
2018, only to fall to $84 at the end of the year and then to trade
at $180 in early September. Dai can also be used to pay for things.
Users of Dai claim to have bought cars and paid their employees’
salaries with the currency. MakerDAO says some payments com-
panies such as Wirex Ltd. allow customers to use the token to
facilitate the movement of funds between crypto currencies and
traditional money.
The Dai token also enables lending. Dai is created when
holders of Ether send their crypto to a blockchain-based computer
program developed by MakerDAO and open what’s known as a
collateralized debt position. The CDP then issues a loan to Ether
holders in Dai. The loan is smaller than the amount of Ether posted
to maintain overcollateralization in case of market stress.
Dai, sold on exchanges such as Coinbase, is also widelycombatant— revolved around how decentralized financial services
can ever really be. MakerDAO’s founder, Rune Christensen, had
come to believe it was time to move away from crypto anarchism
and integrate the project into the existing financial system. Others,
including Chief Technology Officer Andy Milenius and Schap, saw
such a move as a betrayal of the ideals they cherished.
In an account of the startup’s ideological battles that Mile-
nius shared on the company’s chat server in early April, he said
Christensen, in trying to force his vision on what had been a loose
coalition of developers and businesspeople, gave them an ulti-
matum to get on board with his agenda or leave. While Milenius’s
post said numerous staffers were uncomfortable with Chris-
tensen’s power play, Schap was the only employee he mentioned
by name.
As would soon become clear, her days at MakerDAO were
numbered.
SCHAP’S STUDIES at UT Austin weren’t a natural launchpad for a
career in finance. As a philosophy major, with a minor in French,
she says she told a JPMorgan recruiter her liberal arts education
taught her how to think through problems. The job didn’t suit her
in the end. “I didn’t feel like what we were doing was moving the
needle,” she says. “We were collecting all these fees, but I thought
we were really overpaid. It wasn’t exactly rocket science.”
Schap felt increasingly pulled to the edges of finance. There
just hadn’t been many opportunities to make a career in the crypto
industry, she says, during the five years she’d spent in traditional
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