MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen believes that DAI suffers from bad branding.

In a Thursday call with community members reported by CoinDesk, Christensen suggested rebranding Maker’s stablecoin DAI to better appeal to the masses.

“What’s the right name for a stablecoin if you’re going to try to appeal to normal people? It has to have USD in it,” he said. However, he seemingly back tracked on this soon after, noting that using USD in the name implied a peg to the U.S. dollar, which is not necessarily guaranteed. 

Christensen opined that the need for a branding overhaul for DAI was “the only way to take control of the narrative.” In his view, DAI’s bad branding could be limiting its growth.

Maker should position DAI as a currency that users can generate yield with, and the stablecoin should be seen as the most safe and reliable gamified crypto amongst everything on the market, he said.

To that end, the MakerDAO founder proposed “a complete rebrand, complete new name, complete new look, completely different approach to user acquisition.”

DAI is the fourth-largest stablecoin with a market cap of $5 billion. Unlike most of its U.S. dollar-pegged peers, the ERC-20 token is an algorithmic stablecoin collateralized by a mix of other cryptocurrencies that are deposited into smart contract vaults when DAI is minted. 

Maker also plans to introduce more advanced features for DAI users through a lending platform called Spark Protocol. One of these features includes fixed-rate credit which Messari describes as one of DeFi’s unsolved mysteries.

“It’s a sharp turn from Maker’s old benign strategy of integrating DAI into existing DeFi protocols. Now Maker wants to build its own DeFi ecosystem,” said DeFi researcher Ignas.