Rune Christensen
Rune Christensen is the co-founder of MakerDAO, one of the earliest and most important protocols on Ethereum, and now leads its successor, the Sky Ecosystem. A Danish entrepreneur who entered crypto in 2011 and lost his early Bitcoin holdings in the 2014 Mt. Gox collapse, he co-founded MakerDAO in 2015 to build Dai, the first decentralized, collateral-backed stablecoin on Ethereum. Maker became the largest lending protocol of DeFi's early era, and Christensen later shepherded the protocol through the ambitious and controversial Endgame restructuring, which culminated in the 2024 rebrand to Sky, the launch of the USDS stablecoin, and a system of sub-protocols beginning with Spark. Still one of Ethereum DeFi's most influential builders, he appears across ETV shows discussing risk management, yieldcoins, and the case that DeFi's next era will be built on sustainable onchain revenue.