Background

MakerDAO is a “Decentralized Autonomous Organization” that operates on the Ethereum blockchain. It is known for creating and governing the Maker Protocol, a smart contract platform that enables the creation of a stable cryptocurrency called DAI that is minted (generated) as a result of locking other cryptocurrencies or Real World Assets (RWA) in the protocol. MKR is Maker’s governance token that holders use to participate in the governance (Decision-making) of the Maker Protocol, including voting on proposed changes to the system, such as changes to collateral types, stability fees, and other parameters.

How It Started

The collaboration between TechOps Services and MakerDAO predates the Founding of TechOps Services in 2021. It’s been five years now that the founding members of TechOps Services were initially brought on as employees of The Maker Foundation. This was before it underwent a planned dissolution, passing the treasury on to the community of MKR holders, and formally becoming a DAO.

This transition, from Foundation to DAO, was a huge undertaking for TechOps services as they had to navigate with extreme precaution and planning. TechOps supported an extremely smooth transition for every single team from being inside the foundation to a separate and independent service provider operating as traditional companies as Core Units or Startups.

TechOps formed a so-called Core Unit and submitted a “work and deliverables” proposal for overseeing Maker’s DevOps, infrastructure and IT support. The MKR holders accepted the proposal first for 2021-2022 and then again for 2022-2023.

The Scope of Services

Although the Maker Protocol runs on Ethereum's network, many of its critical components are spread across a number of cloud platforms and use third-party services. All of these need to be managed by a trusted party who keeps them updated and optimized.

The TechOps Team, having the experience and network gathered during its few years of employment at the Maker Foundation, had already proven their trustworthiness and ability to continue performing at the level required. However, the dynamic nature of the environment has led TechOps to adapt continually to changes and uphold the operational integrity of Maker as it continued its growth and occasional pivots along the way.

The TechOps Services team oversees and supports vital aspects of the Maker protocol's infrastructure, including DevOps, TechOps and IT support, ensuring its stability and functionality around the clock every day of the year. At the same time, priority focus is placed on the communication channels available to stakeholders to ensure clarity and transparency of its operations and ROI for the entire community. In summary, this encompasses infrastructure management, swift responses to incidents and emergencies, and addressing requests from the community.

The scope:

• Cloud infrastructure
• Protocol Risk Parameters
• Governance operations
• Blockchain Nodes Hosting and monitoring
• Keepers Development and Operations
• Blockchain Transactions Monitoring
• Automated Monitoring Tests
• 24/7 Monitoring and Incident Response
• Systems billing
• Discord Moderation
• Forum, Twitter & Website administration
• Automation Bots development
• CI/CD pipeline management

A point worth noting is the importance that TechOps places on cost optimization for tools and services. By regular reviewing and monitoring, TechOps managed to save excessive expenditures, ensuring financial efficiency and resource savings which directly benefits future protocol development and the MakerDAO Community.

A Healthy Relationship

It's been five years now that TechOps Services engineers have been helping to run and develop the infrastructure and support systems within Maker, and the process for how things are handled has been a constant evolution of optimizing, pioneering and fine-tuning an ever-growing and changing ecosystem.

To further satisfy the community, TechOps has continuously shared transparency reports with the community through community calls and more recently, through reports posted on the Maker Forum. This is in addition to the already available information on MakerBurn.com.

The result of this partnership speaks for itself. TechOps Services has a long-running history with MakerDAO as it scaled from a conception to one of the largest crypto entities in the DeFi space with a projected profit in 2023 of 73 million USD. TechOps Services has recently been approved for funding for 2023-2024 to continue its operations for the 3rd year running and assisting in the execution of the proposed Endgame Plan.

In addition to that, other teams that spun off from MakerDAO have recruited TechOps Services to handle their infrastructure needs. It is clear that most Web3-related companies require one or many of the services TechOps offers, and it isn't possible to beat the quality-to-cost ratio that TechOps Services is able to deliver; plus the endorsement of such a big entity as MakerDAO confirming their abilities.

Insights Gained

A lesson that people outside of infra-engineering struggle to understand is that Infrastructure and monitoring always require support. Even when the ecosystem is not changing, there’s always the need to keep things up-to-date, upgraded, and monitoring the system even when it’s not changing.

Another practice that is routinely reminded to everyone on the team is to ensure there are backup plans for all monitoring. There’s a lot that can go wrong with automation that won't give the expected results, so it is best to verify all monitoring itself by performing drills to be sure it doesn’t suddenly break without anyone noticing it. These drills are performed routinely to battle-test the team and keep everyone up to date.

Future Plans

A new era has begun as MakerDAO announced its plan to execute what it is calling the “Endgame Plan”.

The Endgame Plan is a proposal to overhaul and improve the governance and tokenomics of the Maker Ecosystem. Its primary aim is for the ecosystem to reach a self-sustainable equilibrium called the Endgame State.

What does this mean for TechOps?

Well… the work that TechOps Services is doing for MakerDAO is already in constant development and scaling, so the team remains prepared for whatever the future holds. The Endgame plan and the introduction of SubDAOs may result in welcoming more projects that require support for new products and services funded by MakerDAO. TechOps embraces all chances to assist Maker in its growth, working on hosting, supporting, maintaining, running and developing infrastructure for these new applications will inspire new challenges and more work for TechOps, expanding the knowledge of the team as they work through new requirements of these technologies expanding and maturing. For example, running all applications in decentralized ways using IPFS or similar technologies is a cause that TechOps wishes to innovate on and support.

“This growth and learning is what drives innovation”

Conclusion

This partnership has stimulated a lot of growth and development on both sides. Both parties have gained immensely from working together and figuring out all the necessary parts to operate in the ever-evolving and ever-demanding space of DeFi and the modern workplace that is being created by these future technologies. This growth and learning is what drives innovation. Being able to offer and share similar expertise with other Web3 projects is the best way to accelerate the development and adoption of these technologies, so it’s an honour to offer our time and knowledge to whoever would like to work with us. If that’s you, let’s talk about it!