Compound Governance is Live

Robert Leshner
Compound Labs
Published in
3 min readApr 16, 2020

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Today, we’re extremely proud to announce that community governance has replaced the administrator of the Compound protocol. From this point forward, all changes (from supported assets, to system parameters) will originate from COMP token-holders — fulfilling our vision of an open protocol that can evolve in entirely new ways.

For a primer on how Compound governance works, please see our COMP announcement and the full documentation.

Distributing COMP

A collection of Compound’s most important stakeholders share the ability to upgrade the protocol:

  • 2,396,307 COMP have been distributed to shareholders of Compound Labs, Inc., which created the protocol
  • 2,226,037 COMP are allocated to our founders & team, and subject to 4-year vesting
  • 372,707 COMP are allocated to future team members (we’re hiring!)
  • 4,229,949 COMP are reserved for users of the protocol
  • 775,000 COMP are reserved for the community to advance governance through other means — which will be announced at a future date
  • 0 COMP will be sold or retained by Compound Labs, Inc.

COMP empowers community governance — it isn’t a fundraising device or investment opportunity. Until the decentralization process is complete, COMP will not be available to the public.

Anyone Can Participate

Possessing COMP and participating in Compound governance are not the same; COMP token-holders can delegate voting authority to any address; their own, a hot wallet (while COMP sits in cold storage), a DAO, or your address.

Already, members of the community and applications built on top of Compound have received voting authority. Anyone with a good idea can marshal support to change the protocol; we’re curious and excited to see how the ecosystem evolves.

Voting Interface

Addresses that hold COMP or voting rights will see a special screen on app.compound.finance — soon, this will be available to everyone, alongside tools to create Compound governance proposals.

Only available to COMP token-holders or voters — for now

Transparent, Liquid Democracy

Out of the gate, the complete history of all proposals, voters, COMP token usage, and governance metrics are available to you in the Compound Governance Explorer.

All information is served through the Compound Governance API, which we encourage developers to incorporate into new products & dashboards.

Compound Governance Leaderboard, 4/16/20

Next Steps

After the governance system has been publicly tested, and is operating in a reliable, distributed manner, we’ll remove the last governance failsafe — our ability to disable community voting in an emergency — and begin distributing the remaining COMP to Compound protocol users.

At that point, the protocol will truly be governed by the community, without any foundation, the original developers, or other centralized middleman in charge.

From all of us at Compound, 📈.

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Robert Leshner
Compound Labs

Full-stack founder of Compound. Chartered Financial Analyst, previously a finance guy.