You're about to see me take a hard look at Maker, the project that has rebranded itself to Sky. I want to walk through a crypto price prediction they really do not want you to see, review this coin honestly, and show you how I do my own research in real time, which I think will be incredibly helpful for you. I've reviewed thousands of altcoins over the last 11 years, and I care about your success as a crypto investor first and foremost, more than I care about lining my own wallet. I'd make far more money just hyping altcoins. Instead, I've come to believe that 99.9% of coins in crypto are fundamentally useless, that there's no real reason to invest in them, and that you should demand, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a coin is somehow different from the masses before you put a dollar in.
You all asked me to review this one. It's a trending coin right now, so let me show you exactly how I look at Maker.
The rebrand from Maker to Sky is the first red flag
The first huge issue I see is that Maker has been rebranded to Sky. Why do they do this? The number one reason, from what I've seen, is that they want a new price chart. These rebrands have been incredibly destructive to investors in the past, which is exactly why I keep telling you about them. What happens is they kill the value of the old coin. Maker still has an old chart going back to 2017. What they really want is that fresh chart and that new coin, because a brand new price chart is easier to manipulate, and the rebrand lets them reallocate the token supply.
On top of that, if you happen to be on an exchange that doesn't support the swap, you can often lose your coins. That's what happened with Gala Games. When they did a remake of the token, a bunch of people lost all kinds of money. So the moment I see a coin like this rebranding, it immediately sets off all kinds of red flags for me. To me it signals a project that doesn't care about its old holders and is intentionally rebranding in a way that's going to cause a lot of people to lose money.
An ERC-20 governance token cannot own anything
If you look at both versions of this, there's a huge problem right away. This is an ERC-20 token with a fully diluted value of a billion dollars. Here's the thing almost nobody thinks about: an ERC-20 token cannot own something legally, and it cannot own something by code. That means, in my view, ERC-20 tokens are fundamentally worthless. In almost every case you're basically holding a meme coin that is totally speculative, because anything created off the chain cannot actually be owned by the coin itself. Retail has taken a long time to figure this out, but the more people figure it out, the more I believe all these ERC-20s are going to go to zero, especially when you can build on the Internet Computer Protocol instead.
This is also a governance token, and to vote you have to pay ETH gas fees. The on-chain votes, as we've seen in DAOs like Arbitrum, are basically just a polling mechanism. The developer still has to manually implement and change the off-chain stuff to even follow the poll. So a governance token that is an ERC-20 is, to me, fundamentally worthless, because it has ownership neither by law nor by code. My honest read is that buying a governance token on Ethereum with a billion-dollar market cap is very high risk and very low potential reward. I'd put it as almost guaranteed to go to zero in the long term, and very likely to lose money in the short term too. There are better options, like the Internet Computer Protocol, which has some of the most advanced tech in crypto and is drastically undervalued.
Digging into the website
Let's take a look at the website and the X account. The website is sky.money, and that's decent branding. It says 600,000 users. But what is this, really? You're just locking something up and saving it? What does it actually do? It looks like there's a stablecoin, and you're converting Maker to Sky. Is this just a DeFi app? A billion dollars for a DeFi app token?
The website certainly looks nice, but you can pay a thousand dollars for a nice website. Would you really buy a billion-dollar token off the back of a thousand-dollar website? The claim isn't accurate either. They call it the "decentralized Sky protocol," but sky.money is not decentralized, because unless it's on the Internet Computer, it's not on the blockchain. And unless the token itself were also on the Internet Computer and set up as a proper DAO governance token, none of this is decentralized. So even the portal through which people learn about this project isn't decentralized. Which wallet is it using? Where are the founders? With something this old, I'd expect a clearly listed team right on the page, but where's the team?
Let me look at why they said they rebranded. They say MakerDAO began in 2014, they grew, and they ran into complexity, so to "pursue the best opportunities in the market" they felt there were scaling issues. The new "decentralized" system doesn't appear to have any real decentralization in it. From where I sit, they just wanted to change it over to get rid of the old holders and cut the price down, and the DeFi website is centrally controlled, which means it's not decentralized.
Checking the community and governance
Let's look at the community. There's a community forum where we can see how much activity there is. The first thing I notice is that the community forum for a billion-dollar project is way less active than the Internet Computer forum. The Internet Computer forum, which has a market cap roughly three times bigger, has something like 10 or 20 times as much activity. That said, this forum is more active than a lot of the forums I see. At least there are posts, and in the last day it looks like there's activity on four different threads. The Internet Computer still has five, ten, twenty times the activity and absolute heat on its forum posts, but at least Sky has some activity. You'd be amazed how many of these projects don't even have a forum at all.
Now the governance. There's a disclaimer when you leave their website, which is a bad sign. On the Maker governance portal you have to delegate, which is fine, and then you have to vote on chain. What a mess, and you pay gas fees to vote on chain. On top of that, a handful of delegates hold the majority of the voting power, so why even bother? The off-chain governance happens on the forum, and the on-chain governance is just polls and executive votes. The developers still have to go in and implement everything manually, but where's the transparency about who the actual developers are? Nothing here tells you anything about who the team behind this is.
Following the social media trail
Look at the Sky ecosystem account: hundreds of thousands of followers. Let's check whether there's a separate account for MakerDAO. The MakerDAO account has 3,000 followers, so maybe they switched accounts over, since you can change the username. The new one has a couple hundred thousand followers. Did they buy those followers? In my experience, almost all of these projects buy their followers, because it's cheap and easy to fake. Based on the relatively low organic engagement, that's the conclusion I'd draw here.
A lot of these junk coins all work together. They work with the same crypto-matrix people who are just pushing useless stuff, and the deal is simple: if you push their stuff, they'll push yours. They all shitpost together to rip everyone off together. This guy, Miles, is not someone I'd trust about any of his information on X. Go look through his feed and he's talking up Berachain, which I've said is going to zero. An absolutely disgusting project. Look at the TVL, the locked DeFi across all chains. With Bera, that TVL number is something you can make whatever you want it to be. You can fake it very easily, and that's what these projects do. They're all participating in this big "extract value, rip you off" circle, sharing each other's posts because all of it is junk. The only way they can get you is with marketing.
Some of the engagement on a few of their posts is decent, and they may have bought less of it and have a bit more real community than some other projects. But why is this project pushing Bera? It makes no sense, unless they're all working together. A lot of these coins share social media managers who run several coins at once, and they all push each other because every one of them is useless. So what are they actually posting about? What is the protocol itself even doing? There are all these posts, but are there any engineers making anything? It looks like useless shitposting. Nothing is being accomplished. It's just a DeFi app.
My verdict
The rebrand is absolutely scammy. They want a fresh price chart so that the ignorant money flowing in sees, "Oh look, it's a brand new project, it's going to have a great pump." That's how ignorant a lot of crypto is. I'd say ignorant is more accurate and more fair than calling it dumb money. Either way, it's scummy. I don't see anything at all to like about this project. At best, you've got a stablecoin in the Sky ecosystem, and that's it. The branding looks polished, but to me this is absolute junk, absolutely useless, and absolutely going to zero. When it happens, I told you so, and I hope you get out of the way before this train wrecks.
I'm out here doing what I can to help you avoid getting ripped off, putting the huge amount of research I've done in crypto to work for you instead of using it to extract as much money for myself as possible. My goal is to help you build a smarter crypto portfolio and learn how to do your own research. If you want to go deeper on how I think about money and investing, you can dig into my Money playlist. I recorded this live, and one thing I love is that you can actually chat with me directly on a blockchain through OpenChat, which runs on ICP. No other blockchain can do that.