MakerDAO governance dashboard and subgraphs
MakerDAO runs its stablecoin protocol through on-chain governance: MKR holders vote on polls and executive proposals that set parameters like the stability fee and the debt ceiling. Early on, that governance data lived across several tools and formats, so seeing what was happening in a vote meant stitching sources together by hand.
Protofire built the Maker Governance Dashboard, an interface that read Maker governance data from the chain and presented polls, executive votes, stake weight, and voter activity in one view. The dashboard was backed by subgraphs Protofire wrote to index Maker governance and the wider Maker protocol. The work was grant-funded and open-source, and Protofire built and shipped both the dashboard and the subgraphs that fed it.
“For token holders who were not deeply technical, the path from finding a proposal to understanding it was slow.”
Why MakerDAO's governance needed a single analytics view
MakerDAO is one of the older and larger DeFi protocols, and it governs itself on-chain. MKR token holders vote in continuous polls and periodic executive votes that change how the DAI stablecoin system behaves: the stability fee, the debt ceiling, which collateral types are allowed, and more.
That model only works if the people voting can see what is going on. In practice the governance data was fragmented across multiple platforms and formats, so getting an accurate, current picture of a proposal's progress or of MKR voting activity took manual effort. For token holders who were not deeply technical, the path from finding a proposal to understanding it was slow.
What Protofire built for MakerDAO governance
Protofire designed and built the Maker Governance Dashboard together with the Maker team. The interface pulled governance data from the chain and showed it in one place: active polls and executive votes, the total stake weight behind each option, how that stake changed over time, and the number of voters per poll.
It also surfaced the protocol parameters that governance controls, including the stability fee, the debt ceiling, and multi-collateral DAI collateral data.
The data layer was the delivered architecture. Protofire wrote the subgraphs that index Maker governance and the broader Maker protocol on The Graph, so the dashboard queried a structured source instead of scraping or polling raw contract state. The front end was TypeScript and React with Apollo Client over GraphQL, and the schema was code-generated from the subgraph so queries stayed in step with the indexed data. Because the whole stack is open-source, the same subgraphs and query patterns are reusable by anyone building Maker-related tooling.
Results
Protofire delivered a public governance analytics tool for MakerDAO and the indexing layer under it. The dashboard shipped at mkrgov.science, reading poll, vote, and parameter data from Protofire-authored subgraphs. The code is public: the maker-governance-dashboard front end, the maker-governance-subgraph that fed it, and the broader maker-protocol-subgraph. All three sit under the Protofire GitHub org, each written by Protofire rather than forked, and all three are now archived.