MakerDAO needed a way to move DAI between Ethereum and StarkNet without trusting a centralized operator. I was part of a small contracted team that built this bridge from the ground up — one of the first serious cross-chain integrations on StarkNet.
The L2 side was written in Cairo, StarkNet's native language for provable computation. At the time, Cairo tooling was extremely early — no package manager, minimal documentation, and a programming model built around algebraic execution traces rather than conventional control flow. Building production contracts in that environment meant working through a lot of uncharted territory.
Beyond the core bridge, I built the operational infrastructure around it: a keeper bot that finalizes pending cross-chain transfers, an oracle that relays Maker price feeds from L1 to L2, and a monitoring system that tracks teleport operations across both chains. I also designed the emergency recovery mechanisms — fallback paths that let users withdraw their DAI even if the L2 sequencer goes offline.