The first Compound Governance Proposal

Robert Leshner
Compound Labs
Published in
3 min readApr 27, 2020

Prior to Compound Governance launching, users were given an opportunity to select which assets they favored adding to Compound; Maker and Tether (USDT) led the poll.

With protocol upgrades now in the hands of COMP token-holders (and their delegates), we’re excited to announce the first governance proposal, to support Tether (USDT).

Proposal 001 — Add USDT Support

In order to add Tether, our team developed (1) an improved cToken contract, which adds support for token transfer fees in the underlying token, and optimizes gas costs, (2) an updated price feed that pegs USDT to $1. These changes have been reviewed by our team and OpenZeppelin.

This proposal would add USDT as a borrowable asset with its own interest rate — but does not allow USDT to be used as collateral. In the unlikely event that USDT experiences a market or technical failure, it would pose no (known) risk to users in other Compound markets.

Participating in Compound Governance

With this milestone, the public testing of the Compound governance system has begun! Any address that has been delegated COMP will have 72 hours to vote; if a majority (and a minimum of 400,000) COMP vote for the proposal, it can be executed two days after voting ends.

As governance begins, we hope that this initial proposal can serve as a template and inspiration for the community to develop their own proposals, upgrades, and ideas. Already, members of the community have set up a forum to discuss proposals, and submitted pull requests to the Compound code repository.

Wednesday, April 29 Update

Voting has ended — the proposal was successful, with 797,981.28 votes for, and 85,580.73 votes against the proposal, and queued in the Timelock. In two days, USDT can be added to the protocol.

We would like to extend deep gratitude to the 24 addresses that voted in the first alpha test of Compound Governance, and the community members that added context to their votes:

Gauntlet Network, Ryan Adams, DefiRate, Jacob Horne, Ric Burton, 1inch, IDEO, and Max Wolff.

Friday, May 1 Update

The first Compound governance proposal has been executed, and Tether is now available to supply and borrow through the Compound protocol — we’re incredibly excited to watch the market evolve.

As a brand new market, interest rates, liquidity, and behavior may be highly unusual at first — please exercise caution when interacting with Compound Tether.

  • Starting today, crypto hedge funds including ParaFi Capital, GSR Markets, and DARMA Capital will be both supplying and borrowing from the Compound Tether market, to facilitate sophisticated trading strategies.
  • Argent, imToken, and InstaDapp that are already integrated with Compound will enable their users to begin accessing Compound Tether.
  • Soon, exchanges including Binance.US, BitMax, and Coinone will enable their users to begin earning interest on or borrowing Compound Tether (and other assets) from the protocol.

“Coinone’s goal is to be the most innovative leader in the global crypto market; supporting Compound USDT is an important step towards this goal.” —Kevin Cha, CEO, Coinone

If you have any questions, ideas, or issues, join us in Discord and the Governance forum— we’d love to hear from you.

From all of us at Compound, 📈.

--

--