MahaDAO has shared details of a new staking program for holders of its MAHA governance token. The community will need to move fast to participate once the program goes live, however, since just 200,000 MAHA tokens can be staked into the platform for the 90-day period. MahaDAO expects this allocation to be filled within the first seven days, given that a 40% APY is available to participants.
The crypto collateralization and valuecoin issuance project has been moving fast since hosting its Initial Dex Offering (IDO) on December 17. The new staking program, delivered courtesy of Ferrum Network, will give MAHA holders their first opportunity to put their tokens to work, with more utility to come once the MahaDAO platform launches in January. Once live, it will allow DeFi users to mint ARTH valuecoins, the second token in the MahaDAO system.
More Value, Less Volatility
If MahaDAO’s valuecoin vision plays out, the cryptoconomy is about to gain another stablecoin that behaves a little differently to that which has gone before. Described as "a new kind of money that maintains its buying power irrespective of which direction the market moves," ARTH is not designed to maintain a $1 peg. Rather, it is designed to hold its purchasing power, which will be achieved through rebalancing the assets held in the MahaDAO vault.
Through adjusting the ratio of fiat currency, gold and BTC, MahaDAO will be able to ensure ARTH maintains relative stability, hence the idea of a "valuecoin." This process works differently to stablecoin seigniorage projects, whose native asset isn’t technically backed by anything, and thus there is less underlying risk. At the same time, MahaDAO’s decentralized design avoids it being placed in the same bracket as Tether, for instance, whose regulatory status remains uncertain.
Big on Governance
It’s become obligatory for DeFi projects to launch with a native governance token that can be used to support onchain voting, allowing community members to submit budgetary and protocol improvements. While governance tokens aren’t new to crypto, they became de rigueur this year, thanks largely to Yearn Finance, whose YFI token started trading at $31 dollars before pulling a 100x and then some. MahaDAO’s own governance token has also enjoyed a bumper start, gaining 35x in its first week.
The real test of what the token can do, beyond governance and price appreciation, will become clear once MahaDAO launches its platform in the coming weeks. The project has promised that MAHA holders can vote on matters such as "savings rates, stability fees, direction, strategy and future course of action for the ARTH coin." For example, they may be able to dictate the weighting and type of assets that are stored in the MahaDAO vaults.
As a Polkadot project, albeit one whose token sale raised in ETH on Polkastarter DEX, MahaDAO will straddle multiple DeFi ecosystems. There are plans for the ARTH token to be issued on more than one blockchain, supporting interoperability while allowing the valuecoin concept to gain as much traction as possible.