On Friday, Marker’s governance community voted in favor of expanding US Treasury bond holdings to $1.2 billion. If fully approved, the proposal will enable Maker to more than double its present $550 million Treasury bond holdings.

Maker began investing in US Treasury bonds through the “MIP65” improvement proposal last October. The latest proposal raises the debt ceiling for such investments and subsequently increases the amount Maker can inject into liquid bonds.

Maker explains that the extra $650 million that will be made available through the proposal will be invested in US Treasuries with maturities evenly split over 6 months. According to the company, the approach ensures that these Treasuries mature bi-weekly.

How Maker’s Governance Community Voted

Over 77% of the votes cast passed the proposal to increase the debt limit, while 22.3% of the votes were against the adjustment. Meanwhile, the remaining 0.7% percent indicates eligible voters who opted to abstain from voting.

Some of the notable voters included the London Business School Blockchain, crypto product firm GFX Labs, ConsenSys, and the analytics company Flipside Crypto.

Despite the vote being in favor of the amendment, maker governance still has to endorse the change in a different executive vote to be conducted at a later date. After that, the update will be deployed directly to the Maker protocol.

What’s driving the Change?

Maker’s move to invest in US Treasury bonds is part of the company’s effort to become more resilient after DAI, its decentralized stablecoin, briefly lost its dollar peg last weekend following industry contagion stemming from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Last Saturday, DAI fell to the $0.87 mark but recouped its losses on Monday to trade at $1.00. But DAI was not the only stablecoin to go that low. USDC also traded within that region for the better part of the weekend after its issuer Circle announced exposure to Silicon Valley Bank.

DAI was particularly affected because it utilizes the DAI-USDC swaps in its PSM (Peg-Stability Module).

Maker says the protocol will invest some of the USDC tokens in PSM to purchase more Treasury bonds in order to diversify from Circle’s stablecoin.