I am pleased to formally announce our partnership with MakerDAO! Maker provides the MedX ecosystem with a “stablecoin” called Dai. The most important thing to know about Dai is that 1 Dai = 1 USD. This means that patients and physicians who use dApps in the MedX Health System do not have to worry about the volatility of cryptocurrencies like ETH and MEDX.

The most important thing to know is that 1 Dai = 1 USD

Interestingly, our partnership with MakerDAO uses their ecosystem in three different ways. Let’s dive into the details.

Direct ERC-20 Payment

The most direct way that we use MakerDAO is by supporting direct payment from patients to physicians using Dai. Like many other tokens including MEDX, Dai is based on the ERC-20 standard. This means that the smart contracts we write can send Dai just as easily as any other ERC-20 token.

On-chain ETH:USD price feed

At this time ~62M Dai are in existence and they are held in ~7,000 different accounts. While this number keeps climbing, it is still much smaller than the market cap of ETH (currently ~$21B) held in ~44M accounts. Knowing that our users need ETH to pay for gas fees anyway, we wanted to find a way to support payment in ETH and offer users a stable price quote.

Fortunately MakerDAO has an excellent on-chain ETH:USD price feed. This price feed is critical to the underlying collateralized debt position system that is the backbone of the MakerDAO design. This price feed is public infrastructure and we make use of it to quote prices in ETH but fix this to a constant USD value.

Trading ETH to Dai

Finally, because we support payment using ETH, we want to offer our physicians an easy method to switch their ETH into Dai to avoid the possibility of future volatility. MakerDAO provides an extremely easy-to-use on-chain exchange called Oasis Direct. We offer Oasis Direct to our users by providing a link to the Oasis Direct exchange within the MedX wallet.

With the MakerDAO integration now complete, it becomes quite straightforward to add this functionality to additional dApps in the MedX Health System. Here’s looking forward to future collaboration!