Case Study: MakerDAO achieves collaborative, incremental development with Tenderly Virtual TestNets

How MakerDAO Replaced Public Testnets With Virtual TestNets

MakerDAO, a leading DeFi protocol, faced a growing challenge as its decentralized “Ecosystem Actors” teams worked in silos across smart contracts, frontend, DevOps, and risk management. Their reliance on public testnets like Goerli created coordination overhead, required maintaining a separate protocol deployment, and made it harder to keep testing environments aligned with Ethereum Mainnet.

To solve this, MakerDAO adopted Tenderly Virtual TestNets as its primary testing infrastructure. The teams gained zero-setup, Mainnet-synced environments with unlimited faucet access, built-in debugging, and team-specific instances for collaborative, incremental development. With Tenderly, MakerDAO reported that onboarding took only a couple of weeks and that the move significantly improved cross-team alignment, iteration speed, and the overall quality of its Endgame development process.

MakerDAO

Oxdeniz

Lead Technical Coordinator