MakerDAO is the decentralized governance community that enables the generation of Dai, the world’s leading decentralized stablecoin.

The decentralized governance community of MakerDAO manages the generation of Dai through an embedded governance mechanism called the Maker Protocol.

From early adopters and Maker Foundation Employees to MKR holders, ecosystem stakeholders, and community members, the Maker Community is an indispensable and critical part of the Maker system. In short, the Maker Community is MakerDAO.

MKR holders have the sole authority to enact changes to the system through on-chain voting.

The Maker Protocol is the set of smart contracts that make it possible to mint Dai.

The Protocol was the first decentralized finance (DeFi) application to earn significant adoption and remains one of the largest decentralized applications (DAPPs) on the Ethereum blockchain.

All Dai is backed by a surplus of collateral that has been locked into audited and publicly viewable Ethereum smart contracts. Anyone with an internet connection can monitor the health of the system anytime at daistats.com or through other third-party tools.

"Maker" comes from from the term Market Maker.

The idea of MakerDAO became public on March 26th, 2015 with Rune Christensen’s post, Introducing eDollar, the ultimate stablecoin built on Ethereum, on the r/ethereum subreddit.

This was driven in part based upon BitUSD's inability to attract market makers, which resulted in its lack of robust liquidity.

One of the original ideas was to distribute MKR to cryptocurrency market makers, which we later started calling keepers, to ensure they were incentivized in the system and would help bootstrap its liquidity.