Sky

Sky's history did not begin with the SKY contract. Maker's official white paper traces the project to 2015, the first formal Dai system to December 2017 and Multi-Collateral Dai to November 2019. Those stages built the vault, collateral, debt and liquidation machinery that later branding inherited. Calling Sky a 2024 startup would erase the system whose risk and revenue it still organizes.

That inheritance also carries scars. The March 2020 Black Thursday failure, when keeper competition broke down during market and network stress, belongs to Maker's era, not to a token that did not yet exist. It still matters to a SKY reader because governance today steers descendants of those risk modules. A new name did not reset protocol history.

The September 2024 Launch Season proposal was a bundle rather than a logo swap. It introduced USDS as upgraded DAI, SKY as upgraded MKR, sUSDS for the Sky Savings Rate, two converter paths and a Smart Burn Engine migration.

DAI and MKR did not vanish at launch. The design created bridges between an established system and new assets so adoption could happen without an overnight ledger replacement.

Less than two months later, Poll 1151 asked voters whether to keep Sky or recenter Maker. The proposal page described three paths with different consequences for the backend name, MKR, SKY and future migration. CoinYQ does not infer the vote result from that options page. Its importance is the documented hesitation: brand continuity remained unsettled even after the product contracts were live.

The decisive identity change arrived through governance plumbing. The May 19, 2025 spell moved active voting to SKY and Chief V3. Current documentation describes the old Maker portal as a place to withdraw MKR from legacy delegation and Chief V2, while the Sky portal accepts SKY voting. MKR can still exist and trade, but it no longer carries the protocol ballot it once held.

Converter V2 makes the transition asymmetric. One MKR produces a gross 24,000 SKY, then the contract subtracts its current fee, burns the MKR and transfers SKY already held by the converter. There is no protocol reverse function. The delayed-upgrade penalty started at 1% on September 18, 2025 and was scheduled to increase every three months unless governance intervened. The famous ratio is therefore an input to a formula, not a promise of the net amount a late upgrader receives.

SKY, USDS, sUSDS and stUSDS sit in one ecosystem but encode different positions. SKY enters governance and staking. USDS targets one dollar and serves as protocol credit. sUSDS is an ERC-4626 savings position whose redemption value changes with the governance-set savings rate. stUSDS supplies a specialized pool for loans backed by staked SKY. Merging those labels into a single 'yield token' story would assign stablecoin and lending rights to the wrong asset.

The interface is another layer. Skybase International says it operates Sky.money without custodying assets or controlling protocol parameters. A SKY holder can use that frontend to stake, delegate or borrow, but executable governance runs through onchain contracts. Voting power must be activated through locking or staking; a passive wallet balance does not vote by itself, and access through a polished interface does not turn Skybase into the issuer of every protocol obligation.

Sky's August 2026 token guide says new emissions are permanently disabled and maximum supply is capped near 23.46 billion. It also says staking rewards now come from protocol-surplus-funded purchases rather than new issuance. Those are clear current-state claims, and the live token supply shown by an explorer is consistent with a finite figure at the reviewed moment.

The verified SKY code, however, still contains `mint`, `rely` and `deny`; minting depends on addresses recorded as authorized wards. Code capability is not the same as active authority, and an empty or irreversibly constrained ward set could make that path unusable. This review did not reconstruct every authorization event and current ward. The prudent conclusion is narrower than either slogan: current materials describe a cap and no new emissions, while a holder who needs code-level immutability should verify the live authorization state and governance execution path.