## Executive Summary

[MakerDAO](https://makerdao.com/) is a platform that offers a decentralized stablecoin called Dai, pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, and collateralized loans through the Dai credit system. People come to Maker to either create CDP’s, or to buy or exchange Dai.

"From our dev tools standpoint, I can be connected to Ethereum anywhere I am. When I’m at home I have a node, but when I travel I fall back to Infura so I can always do what I want to do with the network."

Mariano Conti

Head of Smart Contracts

## Challenges

MakerDAO is one of the oldest projects in the ecosystem. Because it started prior to the Ethereum mainnet, the team had to build everything from the ground up: from smart contracts, to tools to infrastructure. As the ecosystem developed, MakerDAO started creating more developer tools and observed the need to include a node solution as part of its toolkit.

## A Core Component of the Developer Toolkit

Infura is applied across a lot of the Maker portals. If a person enters the CDP portal and doesn’t have Metamask, MakerDAO use Infura as a way to populate all that data. MakerDAO also uses Infura as its ‘backup’ node solution to ensure all developers can use the MakerDAO toolkit. If a developer doesn’t have an active node, MakerDAO defaults to Infura. This reduces friction, particularly for new users.