Compound Autonomous Proposals
The Compound protocol is maintained and upgraded through a community governance system in which COMP token-holders and their delegates debate, propose, and vote on all changes to the protocol. Currently, the governance system requires users to have a minimum of 100,000 COMP delegated to their address, before they can formally submit a governance proposal.
While this requirement has not been prohibitive to the creation of thoughtful governance proposals over the past several months (total 22 submitted, 18 passed), there has recently been vibrant discussion on the possibility of lowering the 100,000 COMP-delegated requirement.
Whether or not a formal proposal is created to lower the requirement is up to the community. However, today we are proud to announce a tool that dramatically reduces the barrier to creating proposals, while still satisfying the encoded requirements of the existing governance system: Autonomous Proposals.
Empowering the Community
Compound Autonomous Proposals (CAPs) allow anyone with a minimum of 100 COMP to create and deploy an Autonomous Proposal, which is a smart contract that includes the same parameters as a formal governance proposal (title, description, governance actions).
The next step is gathering public support. Anyone can support the Autonomous Proposal by visiting app.compound.finance/vote, and delegating their votes to the Ethereum address of the CAP.
When a CAP reaches the proposal threshold (currently 100,000 delegated votes), anyone can call the public launchProposal function, which creates a formal governance proposal — and begins the voting process. Immediately after, anyone can then call the vote function on the Autonomous Proposal, casting its delegated votes FOR the submitted proposal.
When a user creates an Autonomous Proposal, they lock COMP into the CAP; at any time, the author can call the terminateProposal function, which returns their COMP and completes the Autonomous Proposal.
The First Autonomous Proposal
Compound Labs built the Autonomous Proposals system, tested it end-to-end, deployed it to mainnet, and has created the first ever CAP: Set Pause Guardian to Community Multi-Sig.
This CAP proposes to set the Pause Guardian address of the Compound protocol to a 4-of-6 multi-sig formed by the Compound community. For more background, please review the details of the CAP.
If 100,000 votes are delegated to this CAP, it will proceed into the formal governance proposal and voting process.
Create Your Own
Autonomous Proposals reduce the barrier to entry for creating governance proposals by multiple orders of magnitude (from 100,000 COMP to 100).
On the Vote page of the Compound Interface, any user with 100 COMP in their wallet will see a Create Autonomous Proposal button. Clicking this button will launch a flow for users to title, describe, and configure the proposal they wish to create, and then deploy their Autonomous Proposal.
Try it out, and share your Autonomous Proposal with the Compound community on Twitter (@compoundfinance), in the Compound Community Forum (comp.xyz), and in the Compound Discord.
As Autonomous Proposals start to aggregate large numbers of delegated votes, you’ll also start to see them on the Governance Leaderboard. Perhaps your Autonomous Proposal will be one of the first!
