Ten Fun Facts About Maker

This article was first published on the MakerDAO official account, author MakerDAO

1. MakerDAO initially planned to launch on BitShares

Before the emergence of Ethereum in 2014, the founders of MakerDAO were active members of the BitShares community, exploring the launch of the stablecoin Dai on the BitShares platform. However, they later found that the BitShares network could not support a complex financial system that required flexible and robust governance and risk management, leading them to choose the Ethereum platform.

2. Dai was born before the Ethereum testnet was released

The earliest prototype of Dai was created in March 2015, two months before the official release of the Ethereum testnet. Founder Rune shared the protocol design, contract code, and testing frontend with members of the Ethereum community, including Vitalik, on Reddit.

3. Dai had several other names before its final choice

When MakerDAO was established, the Chinese-speaking founder Rune decided to name Maker's stablecoin with a Chinese name. The first idea was JIAO, meaning "exchange," as the Jiaozi from the Northern Song Dynasty was one of the earliest forms of paper currency in the world. However, JIAO was quickly abandoned due to obvious associations. Ultimately, the name was settled on Dai, meaning borrowing.

Dai is short with only three letters, and the earliest proponent of the cryptocurrency concept was also named Wei Dai. In Slavic languages, Dai means "to give," and in many Asian languages, Dai is also closely related to finance.

4. The Maker community was an early supporter of the Ethereum DAO fork

After the DAO attack incident in July 2016, the MakerDAO and DigixDAO communities issued a joint statement supporting the hard fork of the attacked network, which led to today's Ethereum.

5. Dai was initially pegged to Special Drawing Rights, not the US dollar

In the original design, Dai's price was not pegged to the US dollar but attempted to peg to Special Drawing Rights (SDR). However, the designers gradually realized that SDR was more volatile compared to the world currency, the US dollar, and had not become a widely used standard, so they chose to peg it to the US dollar, which has continued to this day.

6. Maker developed the earliest DEX on Ethereum

What was the first DEX on Ethereum? The answer is OasisDEX, a decentralized trading protocol that predates EtherDelta, enabling fully on-chain matching and settlement, and became an early source of liquidity for platforms like Uniswap and dYdX.

7. Maker developed the most widely used WETH

The widely used ERC20 format ETH -> WETH (Wrapped ETH) comes from the Maker development team.

8. Maker's obscure and complex code is intentional

Many developers studying the Maker protocol are often surprised by its complexity and almost obscure terminology. In fact, this complexity is intentional. The varying lengths of variable names and their parts of speech correspond strictly and clearly to different equations and modules.

9. Maker is the first decentralized protocol to undergo formal verification

Formal verification of code is typically applied to the most critical software in engineering systems, such as those used in aerospace engineering, to ensure the accuracy of key safety functions. Due to the high risks and immutable nature of blockchain, software vulnerabilities cannot be easily modified after initial deployment, making formal verification of smart contracts a standard in the Ethereum ecosystem.

In September 2018, the Maker protocol became the first decentralized protocol to undergo formal verification.

10. Maker has held weekly public governance meetings for five consecutive years