Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital heavyweight, is selling a portion of its investment in MakerDAO’s MKR governance tokens as the coin’s price reaches a near one-year high. According to Ethereum blockchain monitoring website Etherscan, $7 million of MKR were transferred from a16z’s crypto wallet to a newly created address late Thursday. This new wallet then began depositing batches of 1,380 tokens – worth roughly $1.5 million – per day to crypto exchange Coinbase, signaling intention to sell. Up through Tuesday, deposits from that wallet to Coinbase totaled $6.1 million.
The surge in MKR’s price was due to the activation of a new token buyback scheme that is removing coins from the market, reducing their supply. MakerDAO is one of the largest decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platforms and the issuer of the $4.6 billion stablecoin DAI. The venture capital firm was one of the largest investors in MakerDAO, purchasing 6% of MKR’s supply for $15 million in September 2018.
The protocol is currently undergoing a major overhaul spearheaded by founder Rune Christensen, said a representative of a16z. The so-called Endgame Plan includes breaking up the protocol’s units into smaller, autonomous entities (SubDAOs) that could issue their own tokens.
Despite the sale, a16z’s crypto wallets still hold 12,395 MKR – 1.3% of its circulating supply – worth $14 million, per blockchain forensics platform Arkham Intelligence’s data.