Andy Milenius
Former CTO, MakerDAO. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
engineerexecutive@milenius ↗milenius.org ↗
Andy Milenius was the Chief Technology Officer of MakerDAO, where he designed the smart-contract architecture and Collateralized Debt Position system behind the DAI stablecoin. He departed MakerDAO in 2019 over governance and decentralization disagreements to pursue open-source tooling and personal projects.
1shows
1appearances
18statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Andy Milenius said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Milenius: DAOs require fluid, contextual leadership rather than no leadership
“Part of our experience of growing up has been to not be afraid of leadership. Leadership is so big. With humans, whether they're coordinating on mass scales, on micro scales, or anything in between, you know, we've really learned that a good leader is worth ev…”
Milenius: Bitcoin behaves as digital gold and improves on physical gold
“Bitcoin, as we've seen, how it's behaved in the wild, it behaves a lot like digital gold, and it's definitely an improvement on physical gold”
Milenius: Transparency and open source will stabilize blockchain credit long term
“And so I think that the transparency, the auditability, and the open source ethos is what is going to be its most regulating or stable sort of influence over the long term, because if there's any funny business, you can't get away with it, right?”
Milenius: Maker mints MKR to cover bad debt during collateral crashes
“In the case where one of the collaterals that they accept to be issued against, if they ever make a mistake, and that collateral loses all of its value overnight, then all of the die that was issued against it needs value to be backing it. And so what happens …”
Milenius: Maker is Ethereum's first formally verified non-trivial application
“We are very proud to be the first application to be launched on the Ethereum blockchain that is formally verified. There have been experiments with this up to this point. This is the first non-trivial application that will be launched that will have these guar…”
Milenius: Purely self-centered participation prevents successful DAO coordination
“If everybody comes at this from, like, some kind of hyper-rational, self-centered, I'm only in it for myself, mentality. Then they'll just never coordinate. They'll never cooperate, you know, and they'll never put aside their differences and do the hard work o…”
Milenius: Daily commerce over 5,000 years relied more on debt than gold
“In terms of the day-to-day lived experience of people's lives working with money over the last, you know, 5000 years, a lot of it actually hasn't been with gold currency in it. It's actually been with debt money.”
Milenius: Debt acts as a time machine pulling future value into present
“Debt money is very interesting because it allows you to sort of see into the future, right? If you have a good expectation of what's going to happen in the future, and you want to access that value right now, you can issue debt against it. So I think of debt a…”
Milenius: Currency refers to units, while money is a collective social agreement
“Currency and money are actually different. It's a subtle distinction, right? Currency are units. These are the things that we can or can't use as money as we want to, but money is much more like a symbol. It's a collective understanding.”
Milenius: Stablecoins are simply a rebranding of traditional money
“If you really think about it, a stable coin is just a rebranding of money. Because it just works the same way as money, and money is a very interesting feature in the sense that when you use it, you don't really think about the fact that it's stable. The whole…”
Milenius: Stablecoins will leapfrog legacy financial infrastructure in developing markets
“I think that the reason that stablecoins matter is actually very related to the reason that blockchains matter, which is that because it has so many implications for other applications, I think will be a really interesting like skip level technology, similar t…”
Milenius: Traditional banks will continue to exist alongside Maker
“I think that banks will continue to do that and Maker basically has no dog in that fight because we don't exist in any single country.”
Milenius: Blockchains enable traditional banks to become transnational actors
“Seeing it as this emergent, accessible space, I think, is really, really compelling for not only banks, but, like, tons of different finance companies and different enterprises in general to suddenly become these transnational actors that they weren't before, …”
Milenius: Diversified asset pools protect DAI against single-asset failures
“And so, one of the really, really important details about DAI is this idea that there's a lot of different types of assets. So you can imagine supply chain invoices, you can imagine, like, commodities like gold, you can imagine pure cryptocurrencies like Ether…”
Milenius: Effective governance will make MKR increasingly scarce over time
“If the MKR holders do a good job, then we can expect MKR to become more scarce over time.”
Milenius: Smart contracts function like virtual hardware due to immutability
“One of the most interesting ways that smart contracts are different from traditional software engineering is that they actually have the characteristics of virtual hardware.”
Milenius: Around 1M new DAI enter circulation weekly
“Something like about a million new DAI come into circulation every week as people lock up ether and issue against it, which is so cool.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Andy's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Former CTO, MakerDAO | 1 | 18 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |