How Compound Optimizes Infura Usage to Power Their DeFi Protocol

An interview with Compound’s CTO Geoffrey Hayes about how Infura ensures high-availability for users during times of every-increasing network activity.

Published in

ConsenSys Media

2 min readMar 27, 2020

In the past year alone, we have seen the rapid evolution and adoption of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that are working to create an open financial system with new financial assets and protocols. These applications allow people to do things like trade digital assets on decentralized exchanges, borrow using crypto assets as collateral, or earn interest on their crypto holdings via multiple interest rate markets. Yet ultimately, the interoperability, programmability, and composability of DeFi applications lends itself to infinite possibilities.

One application in particular that has made massive strides is the interest rate protocol Compound Finance. Compound is creating a decentralized protocol for the frictionless borrowing of Ethereum assets and a safe positive-yield approach to storing assets. At the time of writing, they have over $110M of assets earning interest across 8 markets and in 2019, they were the leader in the “finance” sub-category, according to a recent Binance Research Report.

We caught up with Geoffrey Hayes, CTO of Compound, to learn more about the protocol, how the team is batching requests to optimize their Infura usage, and why they chose Infura for their infrastructure needs.