2018-2019 proved this was possible as Ether crashed from its heights of $1000 all the way to below $100 over the course of a few months. The question on everyone's mind was whether an overcollateralised system would be able to retain the value of the synthetic asset even after the price tanked significantly.

They went very aggressive with marketing, promoting the project, ensuring 3rd party developers to build interfaces (InstaDApp was born out of this need as well) and revamping marketing materials overall. Many people in the industry today may or may not remember the space however DAI was an obscure coin that you maybe had heard about as the 'edgy' thing at the time. Throughout 2018 the tech progressed although marketing was severely lacking and it took close to 8 steps to open up a CDP. Early 2018 when the officially launched it was groundbreaking in the community, my own DeFi startup (on-chain recurring payments protocol) was going to rely on it heavily as well since merchants could accept real US dollars rather than volatile Ether. Having any notion of USD inside smart contracts meant you had to rely on Oracalize (I think they've rebranded to something else now). You have to remember, this was a time before Tether was on Ethereum, USDC/USDT/USDC were even around and the idea of a stable coin was even possible. The project itself has humble origins starting in 2015/16 by Rune and many other Ethereum die-hard believers in the vision of creating a permission-less, decentralised stable coin on the Ethereum blockchain. If there's a project that every DeFi fan is obsessed about, MakerDAO takes that spot any day.

Red pill eth