MakerDAO cofounder Rune Christensen proposed using a fork of the Solana blockchain to act as the foundation for NewChain – a new standalone blockchain that will host a reimplementation of the Maker Protocol.

In a post on Maker’s governance forum, Christensen laid out his plans for creating NewChain, which will form the fifth phase of Maker’s endgame.

He envisions that the new blockchain will contain the backend of the Maker Protocol and its SubDAOs, while all existing frontend systems will remain untouched. Instead, they will be connected to the new blockchain through “two-stage gravity bridges” secured by Maker.

While conceding to the fact that building and maintaining a new chain from scratch would be a significant task, he suggested that forking an existing open source project would mean “most of the work will already be done.” 

In his view, the project with the most promising codebase is Solana, for three main reasons. The first is the technical quality of the Solana codebase, which he believes is optimized for operating a single, highly efficient blockchain. The second reason was its resilience to the FTX blowup, and the third was already forked projects like Pyth which runs its own version of Solana for its backend. 

Although he mentioned Cosmos as the other main contender, he believes that Solana is more built around performance.

The proposal garnered mixed reactions from the crypto community, with some questioning why another EVM-based rollup wasn’t up for consideration.

“There is literally no reason why this is a good idea. MakerDao is nothing without Ethereum. And this gives no benefits,” wrote one user. 

Meanwhile, members of the Solana community, including founder Anatoly Yakovenko, welcomed the idea of Maker using its codebase.