Compound Finance COMP rewards

Ideas
#11

I really like the goals that @getty , @allthecolors and others have laid out.
Broad goals:

  1. Incentivize participation in governance and voting
  2. Incentivize new users over new capital.

I’d like to lay out two more broad goals that are worthy of COMP distribution:
3) Maximize protocol revenue even at the expense of TVL (the Uni-V3 strategem)

Losing the recursive farming TVL on collateral assets is not a big loss as it doesn’t add much to net liquidity. COMP farming TVL was arguably more important when TVL was what made a protocol viable, but those days are long gone. Revenue is more important. So eliminating the 50/50 reward is a big step towards more efficient use of COMP. It will also reduce selling pressure from pure farming strategies.

  1. Support and expand the protocol (especially V3 - Gateway)

Incentivizing use of V3/Gateway is critical for making Compound a key protocol for every single smart contract chain. We’ve seen the huge opportunities that arose on BSC, Polygon, and Solana & should work hard to cement Gateway as THE key liquidity provider and bridge between chains. So, incentivizing supply on Gateway is critical, and to a lesser extent incentivizing borrowing.

Borrowing is already very lucrative to those who are sophisticated enough to do it. Borrowing stables enables long positions and yield farming. On the volatile side, shorting alone is a massive incentive; it allows massive optionality that hasn’t been fully realized by retail users.

Shorting lets you delta hedge, which could cover a large % of your ETH or BTC holdings and insulate your borrows during market crashes. This is arguably more important than making money with naked shorts.

The major gap on the borrow side is sophistication of users and usability of tools. Things like Instadapp fill a need in that regard. The space has the potential to evolve beyond interest rate arbitrage and yield farming. This is where the grant program can step in big-time! Grants should be supporting projects not only on the lending side but also targeted towards borrowers.

There could be small projects targeted towards making borrowing from Compound more convenient (better UX), widespread (e.g. credit cards or payday loans type deal), or more tightly integrated into swap platforms (e.g. like Impermax on a bigger scale and multichain)

2 Likes
#12

shoutout to @getty and @allthecolors for caring.

If you take a look at who are the biggest market participants, you get Yearn, Instadapp accounts, and some other friends who like to hang out in the HF (1.00-1.05) range. Yes, they stabilize rates, yes, dumping COMP is kosher, its a free market, but is this the way to run a business?

I mean compound isn’t a business, its a bunch of bytecode and magic internet money, so there’s no precedence. That’s why we must create precedence. Compound was the first to liquidity mine in money markets, and became a large portion of the money markets because its giving away 10 times as much as it makes, kind of.

Ether we act like a bank and figure out our balance sheet prospectus, start compiling by Basel 3/4
(We mostly are, our reserve ratio is above 7% on average and who knows about Tier 1 and Tier 2 equity) or, we act like a business and stop giving equity away for no reason. Around 30% of emitted daily is dumped on on chain, which is fine, but it should be addressed. I think a slp/LP/BLP COMP/ETH token as collateral would help align incentives in that regard.

But honestly, cut 100% of COMP distribution, we need a clean slate to help gateway and other bridges, lets stop giving away over 600 COMP a day to Yearn, and I don’t know, give it to ourselves?

some dashboards I made

https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/y-dai-AcpK-S
https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/y-usdc-_WiNbL

1 Like
#13

I’m a big fan of the kyber pool governance model. (Except for the burn capability)

1.Governance trust less pool staking. ( delegator keeps all staking rewards)
2. Voting epoch occurs every two weeks. Increased voting periods, greater rewards, greater participation.
3. Minimum 2 week staking period to qualify for voting rewards.
4. Votes required,l to approve proposal based on % staked, not % of total supply.

#14

I might be missing something here. How is it a bad idea to reward early users? What would comp be without the risk those people took. People could’ve lost all their money but they used the protocol anyway and trusted comp. Does that not mean anything to the founders?

Do yall worry that airdropped users will just dump the tokens? vest it if you have to. Then while it’s vested give those users an early credit so they can make proposals and stuff.

If it’s more governance participation you’re looking for then I believe giving power to your day 1 supporter would do that.

I wish there was more discussion on this other than “we just don’t wanna do that”

1 Like
#16

This topic is okay. I like 2, 3 (if there is any way to make it non-gameable), 5 is the same as 3 basically and I do like the Airdrop idea if it can be done in a way where users can only claim it if they continue to use the protocol & we have it to where zero COMP will be essentially burned due to non-accessible accounts.

With that said, I’m with @massnomis for turning this protocol into a business (or at least a self-sustaining protocol that will always have a COMP balance in which can be used for stuff, like for paying @getty and @allthecolors). Just think, if Compound runs out of COMP, what does this forum look like?

I see there being an unlimited (sort of) supply of COMP that can help with distributing the COMP rewards to suppliers/borrowers. The COMP earning rewards on the borrow side of the COMP market could actually be used as a stream of income for continuing rewarding Compound users.

Everyone’s first take at this market (me included) see the borrow cap or the distribution of COMP rewards as something we need to stop immediately. However, looking at it from a POV where it was Compound Governance in control of the Borrowed COMP, it kind of makes sense as a revenue stream.

I say that Compound should depreciate the current COMP market and create a new one where our community adjusts the amount of COMP borrowed to maximize COMP rewards / incentivize COMP suppliers. This could be a non-collateralized debt position which would be secured by the Compound Treasury. Not only could this keep the COMP rewards going longer (forever), but also could implement something like a quarterly vote to where the community chooses a proposal to back with the borrowed COMP.

1 Like
#17

Fantastic ideas @getty !

I very much support idea 3 - supersizing the grants department. We could do a trial run of a decentralized grants department and have it overseen by a few key individuals. That way, we can collectively generate the best ideas to grow Compound and even further, the DeFi ecosystem.

I’m against incentivizing people to participate in governance. We don’t want ill-informed voters and/or people simply voting with the herd. Rather, I think we should push to get people to delegate their votes to active governance members - the people who know the protocol the most and have skin in the game. We could reward these delegates for the governance work they’re doing.

In talking to friends, the #1 reason why they aren’t using DeFi and why I don’t really encourage them to use it is because of gas fees. Gas fees are acceptable for those with $10k+ in crypto, but it’s hard to justify paying $20+ to deposit when they’re only playing with a few hundred dollars. So I’m all for gas fee reimbursements and hope that doing so creates [more] precedence for other protocols to do the same.

We could even do more in regards to gas fees… possibly enable minting/borrowing/redeeming/repaying by signature? Then have Compound Labs batch execute these events? Off-topic though.

3 Likes
#18

Gas improvements are coming. Decentralized, open-source batch smart contract. Along with other gas improvements which are rewarded through RFPs. I don’t like the idea of spending more on gas fees. When DeFi goes mainstream, gas fees will be the least of our worries.

3 Likes
#19

That’s interestin discussion overall, as indeed COMP distributions have a lot of things to improve. I see kind of a lot of focus on rewarding voters, that in some way mentioned both in 1 and 5 ideas, so i want to start with that.

Let’s say it straight: amount of voters is really massively irrelevant. It really doesn’t matter if people vote or not and especially very small, “dust amount” holders. They have absolutely zero impact on outcome, and in general, holders of single-digit comp should rather be delegating than voting themselves. Voting power is what matters, not amount of voters. Voting power is concentrated in very few accounts. How and if they vote DO matter, remaining 10-20% (that isn’t exact number) of voting power spreaded across hundreds of adresses does not. That’s the facts. Participation doesn’t really matter and that goes directly from distribution of voting power and thus anything spend on incentivising useless action is wasted money. Who we going to fool here with massive participation when every single decision can be made regardless of participation of masses.

However, i fully support everybody who want to execute their voting power. Either by directly casting a vote, or by delegating their voting power to their representative. That’s their right.

But i’m really curious: Does nobody really thought why participation isn’t that massive? Aside of people just thinking that their vote matters not?

The problem here isn’t because people are so ignorant. It’s just COMP token design itself is so bad and outdated. It kind of based on assumption that COMP token is valueless governance token, which primarily would be held in wallet. And that kind of
assumption never worked from the very beginning. As soon as it hit AMM and become paired to assets which have value, it gained value as well, regardless of initial vision.

So right now COMP is financial asset, which do have a value which also “kind of” could be used in governance.

The problem here is that there are 2 basic real life usecases for that type of financial assets:

  1. It can be used as collateral

  2. It can be used for LP at AMM DEXes like usiswap, sushiswap, etc.

And interesting enough if you try to use it in any of this ways, you are instantly unable to participate in governance by design. Because in both cases you can’t keep token in wallet. And thus it instantly looses it’s utility in governance.

Fortunately Compound is Lending platform by itself, so Collateral usecase is relatively easy to solve with already pretty much existing code. And here we come to COMP staking. What is COMP staking? Well, in our case, it’s basically just a Compound
market with only Supply side present. But it wouldn’t earn any interest, you’ll tell me. Yea, and it’s not supposed to. But it will earn COMP distribution. And it will give that distribution for those who hold COMP. And that is, a way to
improve COMP distribution. AND because same address hold the same amount of cCOMP, it’s theoretically possible for COMP staker to participate in governance still.

And of course, we should never forget that existing COMP market is a SHAME and DISGRACE of all DeFi. Example of market manipulation via artifitially setting CAP and rewarding select portion of users for months, at the expense of everybody else.

Every single person holding more than 65k COMP should feel personally responsible in that mismanagement. Because they actually are, by being aware, having power to create a proposal to fix that and yet taking no action. And if regulation eventually comes to crypto, that would be example of inability of DAO to properly self-regulate. Because, they would say look, they created special privileged group of users, who are earning extra rewards. And that isn’t a market condition, it’s a manipulation.

It’s worth reminding that the problem is still there: COMP market, as it is now is NOT fine.

But let’s go back on topic of improving COMP distribution. It could be somewhat fixed for users who LP COMP in v2 type of AMM. It’s a bit more complicated because of oracle for LP tokens, but it can be done in same way as COMP staking, as a one-
sided Compound market for LP tokens. Voting portion is more complicated as amount of COMP in LP varies, maybe somebody could find technical solution for that. But so far aside of Snapshoting i don’t see anybody made a way to give LP voting power.

Creating such tools not only improve distribution itself: Part of COMP distribution could be diverted to COMP staking and to LP staking. But that also will improve liquidity. Users, who provide liquidity for COMP tokens in various DEXes, are in some
way doing more for protocol, then users just supplying or borrowing funds to Compound.

And actually big portion of users will be able to actually execute voting powers which they DO already have, but actually unable to use, because it have financial costs to actually pull their tokens either from collateral, or from LP to wallet to participate.

Not like i’m strongly against rewarding voters, even though i believe it’s useless spending of COMP. But unless things mentioned above are solved, yeah, i might pull 1 COMP or whatever minimum needed to get distribution and do signing. But i’d
surely not going to pull all tokens from where it makes financial reason for me to keep to just cast a vote, which wouldn’t change anything. (Yeah, as a very long time user, i do hold some very minor voting power, and yes, i pretty much never participate for the reasons i outlined. I’m aware of proposals and could be voting still, if technical options would exist even without any specific rewards for doing so)

I want to shortly mention airdrop. It’s not really that much bad idea. And it doesn’t need to be 200m airdrop. It’s just dragged for so very long time while it should be closed long ago. There is nothing really to discuss, basically only founders and early investors have the voting power to pass it or not. They should just voted on that long ago instead of collecting opinions from those whose opinion doesn’t matter in decision making. Idea itself isn’t that bad, yes. It indeed somewhat improve distribution, because right now COMP isn’t really going to users pretty much at all. It goes to big capital in vast
majority, not to the broad community: small users are diluted by massive capital.

As for expanding grants and separating supply and borrow markets for rewards being able to be fine tuned, it’s both great ideas, enough was said on those and i very much agree with support of that, voiced by others.

3 Likes
#20

I address only 1.

Depending on how it’s done, rewarding people for voting could be a lite version of raiding the treasury:

Whoever votes ‘yes’ on this proposal will split the treasury with me in proportion to voting power.

Compare it to:

Those who vote will receive funds from the treasury in proportion to voting power.

To avoid abuse, I see two problems to solve.

  1. Sybil attacks - create many wallets to vote and receive a flat Comp reward.
  2. Whales draining the treasury at the expense of small holders through a scaling Comp reward.

To address these, Getty suggests a scaling reward up to a limit. (@allthecolors suggests logarithmic scaling, but I address linear.)
This limits 1. because the reward scales up to a point (say 10,000 votes). Basically empty wallets cannot game the system.
This tries to limit 2. to some debatable level. However, this fails to protect against Sybil attacks by any user able to command greater than 10,000 votes during the duration of the program. A user able to command 40,000 votes could split the COMP between multiple wallets during the voting rewards program. Maybe current large COMP holders would be honorable and not Sybil, but there are people who might buy a lot of COMP to farm voting rewards.

How many COMP would someone have to hold to get 10,000 votes in during a duration?
What would they do to artificially increase this number? Make lots of pointless proposals to vote on?
What limits this? If there are 10,000 proposals to vote on today, someone with 1 COMP could receive the maximum reward by voting 10,000 times today.

Is the goal more people thinking about governance?
If so, another way of doing that might be COMP rewards from the grants program to people contributing thoughtful comments on comp.xyz.

If ‘more people thinking about governance’ is not the goal, what is? And why?

#21

This is a great list, and is sure to start a well-needed discussion in the community.

The highest priority, IMO, should be the optimization of the 2,312 :comp:/day distributed to each market, since small changes can have huge rampifications for how COMP is distributed, held, and used, and this currently represents almost the entirety of the distribution.

This is achieved by:

  1. Separating the compSpeed into separate supply & borrow incentives, work which is almost complete (any / all additional eyes, and auditing welcome; as a community we should bring this work to the finish line)
  2. Modifying the COMP distribution in ways which put more tokens into the hands of users; this likely means tying COMP more directly to “natural” use-cases, and less to “farmed” use-cases; collateral assets having COMP rewards only on the supply-side, and borrowing assets (stablecoins) configured with reserveFactors to make “folding” the asset un-economical (no “negative spreads”), but attractive to normal use. If done correctly, more COMP can get into the hands of users looking to participate in governance.

In terms of additional approaches / programs, as a guiding principle:

Expanding the grants team to encompass a full-time team has large upside–to encourage, and coordinate improvements to the protocol that are sustainable (long-term). Protocol improvements – whether on market selection, parameter selection, rate models, new features, and integrations are all results that compound. This is a great direction to explore, especially with the benefit of hindsight after months of operating the grants committee.

Another direction that the community can look, would be increasing the reserves of the protocol directly; figuring out a way to reward users that directly add reserves to the protocol, in markets that have the lowest ratios of reserves:borrowing. This is an alternative to providing COMP to farming users, while capturing most of the value for the protocol (and all users). This could increase safety & liquidity, while testing a new distribution model. It could be tied to vesting, etc.

Rewards for voting on proposals are interesting, but could create perverse behavior (e.g. making hundreds of “dummy” proposals, simply to capture more COMP). If this path is explored, it should be a set quantity of COMP per month, regardless of how many proposals there are, multiplied by participation rate. Now that there is an “abstain” option, it could bring participation close to 100%. This could even include a “quadratic” type reward, where smaller addresses earn a larger relative reward.

#22

#2: Compound is a lending protocol… revenue is generated from borrowers, so if anything, borrowing should be rewarded. Rewarding supply just brings in dead TVL.

Currently as far as I’m aware, the only benefits of COMP are minimal voting rights and dumping. So adding value to holding COMP/locking up COMP, from the minting and/or from converting some of the part of the revenue(now going 100% to reserves?) might be useful.

If you really want to make this a community project, maybe use some of the treasury to hire a dedicated team to work on the protocol? Just because it’s decentralized doesn’t mean there should be no leadership…

Anyway, just my 0.02 COMP :stuck_out_tongue:

#23

I believe Curve.finance does the following: you lock for some years and you get on the pool an high interest rates on what you locked. I think it would be good to lock away some tokens while bringing more attention to the protocol and distribute some of the treasury, another interesting thing would be to increase borrow APY on comp distribution and outright remove supply distribution.

#24

Great writeup @getty. My thoughts on each of the ideas:

  1. I’m not in favor of paying people to vote. In an ideal world, every tokenholder is up-to-date on protocol affairs, reads all of the proposals thoroughly, and votes according to her independent view. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world: it takes a lot of time to get up to speed on governance, and as a practical matter, few tokenholders have the time to vote with an informed view. (I’m not the first to say this; there are always tradeoffs to various governance mechanisms). Paying people to vote may result in incentivizing the wrong behavior: we want people to get informed first and vote second. Paying people to vote for voting’s sake is unlikely to add any tangible benefit to the protocol.

  2. I’m very much in favor of separating supply and borrow subsidies. As a general matter, I think rewards/subsidies/liquidity mining programs should be thought of as growth programs (rather than token distribution mechanisms). As such, they should be managed scientifically. That is, if we’re designing a new rewards program, we should have a hypothesis of what will happen, run the experiment, and compare the test results against the hypothesis. We should do this thousands of times until we are able to understand how users interact with the protocol. Once we have a deep understanding, we can use the data to grow usage, reduce churn, and allow the protocol to use its COMP efficiently.

  3. @getty and I had a few brief conversations about how to turbocharge the Compound Grants Program. One way to do it that is by growing its budget, of course. In my mind, that’s necessary but not sufficient: having the money to fund grants is good, but what’s absolutely necessary is having a well-staffed team of full-time individuals who is able to quickly, efficiently, and dutifully provide grants. One learning we’ve had from the Compound Grants Program experiment is it’s simply not enough to have a part-time grants manager (that’s yours truly). We will share more thoughts on this topic in a separate post in the future.

  4. Presumably, the idea behind subsidizing fees is to grow usage of Compound (particularly with retail users). If that’s in fact the motivation behind the subsidy, then I’m very much in favor. That said, similar to my thoughts in point two, I believe the subsidy should be managed as a scientific experiment. For example, we may have a hypothesis that covering 80% of the fees will grow Compound’s user base by Y, and this user base will churn by Z% over 6 months. To test the hypothesis, we can run a test and compare it against the hypothesis. More importantly, we can run this test hundreds of times until we find the optimal subsidy percentage.

  5. See my thoughts on point one. We want informed voters, not profit-maximizing voters.

I’m glad we’re having this discussion. It’s an important one!

2 Likes
#25

First off, I want to thank everyone for contributing to the topic. This kind of participation is what is so important to developing something the entire community is excited about.

Recap of the ideas:

  1. Reward voters for casting a vote.
  2. Separate supply and borrow side COMP rewards.
  3. Supersizing the grants program.
  4. Transaction fee reimbursement program.
  5. Extra COMP rewards to protocol users who also vote.
  6. Airdrop
  7. Burn

Let’s toss out incentivizing voting (1 & 5), doing an airdrop, and burn. That leaves us with 2, 3, and 4.

  1. Separate supply and borrow side COMP rewards.

@TylerEther is working on implementing separate supply and borrow side COMP rewards. See his post to learn more. In the interest of time, the community should review Tyler’s work and begin the conversation of what speeds to use.

  1. Supersizing the grants program.

Regarding supersizing the grants program. @sukernik is going to work on a proposal for the next phase of the grants program. That should come later this month or in early September.

  1. Transaction fee reimbursement program.

I’ll dig up some of the tools I made for this a while ago and put together a database of Compound transactions for July. I’ll create a new forum post and Google Sheet with that info once I have it, and then we can begin a conversation about what to reimburse.

1 Like
#26

6?
lol!
You 4got 6!!! :upside_down_face:

1 Like
#28

If we reduce COMP liquidity mining rewards notably (as has been discussed), but want to keep the rate of COMP distribution high, we have to come up with ways to distribute large amounts of COMP.

It seems like 1, 4, and 5 wouldn’t move the needle much. 3 (beefing up grants program), is the only larger-scale COMP distribution method here, outside of continued liquidity mining.

Growth / biz dev strategies seem underexplored.

  • A referral program to ‘mine’ new users
  • Some institutional business development schemes would be great to fund, maybe even an institutional liquidity mining program or something (to get more potential power users playing with the protocol)
  • token swaps with other protocols and/or distributing COMP to protocols in exchange for parking treasury funds in COMP

One other idea (that admittedly is a bit half-baked right now)…

“Governance Mining” — Governance participation is perhaps the most valuable activity that we want to reward right now. Right now, we’re funding 1 FTE contributor and a couple handfulls of part-time contributors who have formally applied for grants — however, there is a ton of really valuable ideation, feedback, small governance tasks, etc. that is crowdsourced from the community through the forum, in the governance chat, community calls, and other mediums. This activity overwhelmingly goes unrewarded. We could boost governance participation by “mining” valuable governance activity. For example, we could distribute COMP to people who do things like: identify problems in COMP, propose solutions, offer thoughtful commentary/analysis on proposed solutions, etc.

The positives: this would speed up problem identification and solution ideation, it would get more people meaningfully involved in governance, and it would distribute COMP to a group strongly aligned with the protocol.

The negatives: might dilute the signal of discussion (gov spam), it’s really hard to come up with a quality & scalable heuristic for assessing gov participation (requires a lot of human input)

I think there’s something here. Maybe this just means the grant program (or some group managing the governance mining rewards) gives small monthly grants/rewards to those who it deems have contributed valuable activity in governance, and even if it’s not a perfect distribution method, it’s at least a step in the right direction.

SourceCred is the only model I’m aware of for something like this, but curious if anyone knows of others.

4 Likes
#29

I like the direction of @JacobPPhillips’ thinking around growth / biz dev strategies as untapped potential. That said, I also share the concerns raised about potentially incentivizing un/counterproductive behavior through governance mining. Compound is an innovator in on-chain governance, but I’m definitely not convinced that we’ve found the secret sauce that will make incentivized governance a seamlessly productive use of COMP.

Zooming out, there are currently three major ways for people and organizations to procure voting power in on-chain protocol governance:

(A) Earn COMP directly from the protocol
(i) Earn as a founding team member or early investor
(ii) Earn through liquidity mining
(iii) Earn through governance for an implemented protocol development or through the Compound Grants program

(B) Acquire COMP tokens through secondary markets
(i) Buy COMP on an exchange or via p2p trade
(ii) Borrow COMP through a lending service (CeFi or DeFi)
(iii) Receive COMP from someone as a gift (I’d lump Coinbase Earn in here)
(iv) Steal COMP (obviously this is terrible and not condoned, but to leave it out would be to ignore the very real problem we have with scammers, e.g. on our own Discord server)

(C) Others can delegate their COMP to you

In this thread we are exploring tuning and broadening category (A) in ways that benefit the safety, health, accessibility, and overall mission of the protocol. I’m framing it this way because I think it’s worth emphasizing that this discussion is focused on strategies for apportioning future governance rights that are currently under the full purview of governance.

I support all of the tweaks to (A)(ii) and (A)(iii) that have been discussed (e.g. compSpeed split, supersizing the grants program).

Regarding category (A)(i): the folks listed here were absolutely critical to the funding, development, and bootstrapping of the protocol, so it is fitting that they are entrusted with a significant role in protocol governance. Also critical to the bootstrapping stage was the community of early (pre-COMP) users, would-be stakeholders who were in most cases diluted to oblivion since COMP launch day by the deluge of capital that came to yield farm professionally. Early protocol users should hold a meaningful fraction of collective governance power: perhaps not the full 5% level initially floated by a16z, but at least 1% of collective governance power. What is the rationale for holding this number at 0%?

I also want to signal-boost @rleshner’s suggestion of rewarding on-chain activity in an asset proportionally to its effect on increasing protocol reserves in the relevant asset, with greater rewards for boosting reserves of assets in which the protocol is least well-capitalized. I can’t think of anything more clearly aligned with the goal of promoting protocol health and safety. And for those who envision governance eventually rallying around a periodic disbursement of reserves deemed “excess” to COMP holders, well, this idea could put the feasibility of such a concept on a faster track (fwiw, I would not support such a proposal for quite some time to come, if ever).

I would love to see this “COMP for contributing to protocol health via effects on reserves” idea explored further and ultimately formalized (ideally by someone with more of a risk management background than me!) so we could think about adding it to the RFPs.

3 Likes
Should Compound Retroactively Airdrop Tokens to Early Users?
#30

Another model to crowd-source incentives is Coordinape. (developed in the Yearn community)

#31

I mostly agree that burn mechanism isnt best option in this moment but I would not reject it for the reason that a well-implemented burn function can make the tokenomics system more flexible and sustainable through longer period. As for airdrop I understand the views of users with a large amount of COMP tokens, the thing is quite subjective.
Compound was the first to implement the farming function (relatively) much earlier than the first real airdrop (Uniswap) so it is not necessary to specifically filter early users because realistically no one knew that the DeFi sector would move in this direction. How can someone play a system that doesn’t exist?

High gas fees and pointless impact given the current governance structure was discentivized small voters to participate in governance. If you analyze voters structure on past proposals, you will get it. Users who voted with a negligible amount of COMP tokens either “donated” protocol support or expected a reward for the move. If there is a third reason please state it, because I am blind.

I can’t understand this part. What is the purpose of the lending and borrowing protocol? How does Compound make revenue? Given the very low lending rate, why do USERS put funds into the protocol? If we omit the borrowing function, will the Compound business model be sustainable?

Supersizing in terms of a horizontal hierarchy is a good idea

Great idea

COMP distribution goes in pockets of big holders. Who have and who have not incetives to participate in governance. Maybe we could reconcile this issue with the airdrop issue - users will vote if they have voting power. We can compare two types of users:

  1. Long-term users (2-3 years) with less capital without farming attention
  2. Two weeks active stablecoin farmers with huge amount of capital
    Guess who has a bigger voting power?
    Who is “more important” for protocol growth?

@getty I appreciate your work in the community, I just don’t understand what the point of some opinions and ideas above (1,2,5 + intro). Please accept my criticism as something constructive, as I maybe have the wrong view

1 Like
#32

Well written @allthecolors! Thank you for everything you have done and hope that you were compensated. I am just over everything with Compound for now. I LOVED Compound, told my friends about it, played around with a few borrows, used Compound for what it was for, created a distribution simulator for the community, applied to an RFP, was more active in the forum and was (and still will) listen to the dev calls when time permits.

This will not make any sense until the end. Then, those who give a chit may come back and read the rest.

My first interaction with Compound was just a test of a supply of 180 USDC (LOL!). That 20% APY was my hook. I had to try this out and even thought about draining my savings account out to earn like 200X the 0.1% APR I was getting at the time. Good thing I didn’t drain the savings account… ended up getting locked out of the mobile wallet App I used to create the Ethereum address and the one seed phrase I had not written down by mistake. Oh, well.

Soon, I had built up a nice crypto portfolio from mining, trading and yield farming. Binance kicked me, took them long enough LOL, that is where I was yield farming all of the launchpad tokens like AVAX, KAVA, etc.

So, set up another wallet for interacting with Compound (Check it out if you would like). Using Compound enabled me to earn some money, ended up making around $2k borrowing ETH, then selling at around $4,300. Repurchased between $2,100 and $2,400 and repaid the borrow! Didn’t work out as I had planned, but worked out.

That was my experience with Compound. Now though, after looking at the forum, I see so many topics I feel like I could give ideas to like I used to (maybe all my ideas suck, not really sure, but I’d like to think they are at least helpful), however, its just not really worth it. Lol! All the time I spent on here when I could have been doing ANYTHING else. Was fun, cause here I talked to people that had the same interests, I didn’t have a good selection of places to go to talk to people about cryptocurrencies and DeFi.

@allthecolors, of course the large hodlers of COMP are not going to be 100% on-board with an early user airdrop, for multiple reasons. I just hope that the main reason is because the people/entities who abstained to such just flat-out don’t give a dam about the community of users. They care more about the DApps that interact with the protocol (the reason Compound was developed in the first place) and also care more about how it would look to other COMP whales if they voted on an issue that ended up flash crashing the COMP value. Some things could end up hurting the relationships of other whales.

I feel like you should be aware of people who say one thing, but then when it comes down to when they need to make a decision, don’t follow through with their thoughts…

Oh, and @getty, my honest opinion of this thread? This thread SUCKS! Lol! Sorry, I had to, you asked The only reason you created this thread was because you are against the early user airdrop. You want to divert COMP distribution from being more decentralized to becoming more centralized and gameable.

Centralized ideas: 1,3,4,5,7
Gameable ideas: 1,3,4,5,6

Early users, between the time when Compound launched up until the launch of the COMP governance token have currently been distributed ZERO (0) COMP. Guess they weren’t users? Lol! What a joke, i’m done, peace

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