MakerDAO vault holders who lost about $2.5 million during Black Thursday will not receive any compensation following a governance vote that ended on Tuesday. While decentralized finance (DeFi) continues to garner attention, issues like the type suffered by the MakerDAO project earlier in the year continue to plague the market as a whole.
Following the conclusion of voting on the revised MakerDAO governance poll, vault owners affected during the Black Thursday crash of mid-March will not receive any compensation. This outcome is due to the fact that 65% of the participants voted against compensating the $2.5 million losses incurred by vault owners.
Some reactions to the news on social media say the decision to not compensate vault owners sets a not so ideal precedent. With Maker (MKR) token holders unaffected by the forced liquidations of March 12, 2020, it appears only vault owners were the real losers.
Amid the Black Thursday panic, the crypto arena saw a massive sell-off of tokens leading to a sharp decline in price across the market. The situation mirrored the events seen in the larger investment scene as fear over the coronavirus pandemic saw investors electing to liquidate their assets for cash.
For the MakerDAO project, Black Thursday turned out to be a ‘black swan’ event. As the price of Ethereum (ETH) fell on that fateful Thursday, the network suffered massive congestion which prevented price oracles from updating ETH/USD price in real-time.
With the price oracles failing, undercollateralized vault owners suffered forced liquidations. Some users took advantage of the situation to launch opportunistic profiteering attacks with zero bid and half bids. These rogue actors were able to liquidate ETH from vault owners with little or no DAI given in collateral.
MakerDAO lost $6.65 million in DAI stablecoin during the incident with $4 million of this shortfall being actual “bad debt” for the project. The DeFi lending project was able to service the bad debt via debt auction a few weeks later.
In the aftermath of the forced liquidations on Black Thursday, some affected vault owners sued the Maker Foundation for not providing adequate information about the risks involved in holding collateralized debt positions (CDP).