The direct summand conjecture, part of the homological conjectures in commutative algebra, was first proposed by Mel Hochster in 1973. The conjecture is easily proven when the given ring contains a field, but the ``mixed characteristic'' case seemed, for the most part, impenetrable. In 2016 Yves Andre announced a proof of the conjecture which utilizes the theory of perfectoid spaces. We will attempt to give a (somewhat) detailed proof of the DSC in a simplified scenario, and then give a general idea of the methods used to prove the theorem in the general case.