Table of Contents
- Background
- What have we done
- Key Achievements
- Challenges Faced
- Community and Service provider support
- Notes: need more time to make impact
Background
AlphaGrowth has recently concluded an initial 4 month trial of the growth Program that began on December 15th, after Compound Governance Proposal 199 was passed on December 10th, 2024.
The initial trial enabled the AlphaGrowth team to deep dive into Compound’s business objectives, identify strategies to help them grow, and execute campaigns to test our hypothesis. The following campaigns have enabled AlphaGrowth to hone its vision for the next year of the program while providing the community with ample data to judge the Growth Program’s efficacy.
What have we done?
Over the past 4 months, we identified multiple sectors to target, reached out to 300+ projects/chains/individuals, and participated in more than 130 meetings to advance Compound initiatives with potential partners. We kept the community in the loop through our weekly updates posts and multiple other posts on the forum. Readers can find more information here
Some of the initial sectors we targeted included
- V3 Integrations
- Custodians
- Vaults
- Liquidity Managers
- Exchanges
- Wallets
- Market Makers
After multiple discussions with core community members, we concluded that the limited time of the trial period of the Growth program would be much better utilized on a few impactful launches rather than a broad range of integrations.
Thus we narrowed our focus and only targeted key markets and chains, We also made a forum post to get community feedback on the reprioritization
- USDT Markets on V3 (ETH, ARB, POLYGON, OP)
- OP Chain Deployment
- Grants from partner chains
- Rewards Contract Token Expansion
- Diversify Markets & Asset Listings
- Community Process Documents
- Native USDC alignment
- RWA Initiatives
- Marketing Strategies
- Transparency through Dune Dashboards
Key Achievements
Within its short span of 4 months, the program was able to kickstart and achieve multiple milestones. And many more important features still remain in various phases of development.
User Growth
With a balanced blend of marketing and quests, we managed to successfully test user growth and retention.
USDC market on Arbitrum
Our first trial was done on USDC market on Arbitrum. This led to growth of users from 1.6K to 14K and still increasing. Source - Gauntlet | Forum Post
USDC market on OP
Within the first two weeks of OP launch, the users scaled to more than 6K active wallets. We expect the wallet count to continue to rise way above 8K.
Example timeline of our work: OP Deployment
OP is the second most popular L2 rollup, deploying Compound on the chain had unanimous support throughout the community. We began working on the deployment early January. A brief timeline of the deployment is listed below
Long term and without additional support, we expect the protocol on Optimism to grow to around $40M in TVL. With the growth program providing marketing and grant support, we believe the TVL will grow to $60M or more over the next 12 months.
Challenges Faced
Throughout the 4 month time period, the program accrued multiple learnings. We are confident that our experience in these 4 months has given us enough data to have even more impact during our next tenure.
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Time: Deployments take time, a lot of time!
With coding, audits, voting and all the stakeholders involved, the deployments turn out to be long drawn out processes. OP deployment was started almost immediately as we started the growth program, but overall it took almost around 4 months for the market to be deployed.
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Marketing events are very dependent on integrations:
Over the last 4 months we were able to execute only 1 marketing campaign. The campaign proved to be very successful, but with integrations taking time, our target of 1 campaign a month could not be achieved. As we move forward our Optimism deployment and Arbitrum grant incentives will provide a healthy marketing pipeline.
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Result oriented vs Process-oriented outlook:
Unlike other counterparts in the DAO that happen to be more process-oriented, the growth program, as the business arm of Compound, adopted a more result-oriented outlook to achieve goals.
Fund utilization:
The total ask of the program was 7.77K COMP, the distribution of which was as follows.
| Type | Fund Asked [COMP] | Fund Utilized [COMP] | Remaining fund [COMP] | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BD Operations | 2760 | 2760 | 0 | Service fee |
| Dev Fund | 2250 | 1193 | 1057 | $3000 remaining on Franklin DAO USDT ARB market invoice |
| Marketing Fund | 2760 | 795 | 1965 | $50000 not yet spent on OKX marketing campaign |
Dev Fund Utilization
| Task | Team | Amount | Txn Hash |
|---|---|---|---|
| OP Deployment | Woof Software | [2 + 215] COMP | Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan, Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan |
| Rewards Contract + OP & MATIC USDT Market | Woof Software | 700 COMP | Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan |
| USDT ARB Market | Franklin DAO | $3000 | Invoice sent, transaction yet to be initiated |
| ezETH LRT Market | Woof Software | 275.6 COMP | Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan , Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan |
Marketing
| Campaign | Amount | Transaction | Forum Post |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arbitrum USDC campaign | [2 + 178] COMP | Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan + Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan | [AlphaGrowth] Compound Growth Program - Marketing Updates |
| OP Market Campaign | [7+ 608] COMP | Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan + Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan | Campaign in progress |
The remaining fund 3021 COMP is planned to be reused for the next cycle of the growth program given its enactment by the DAO.
Community and Service Provider Support
Throughout the program, we were heavily supported by the community, the core team and the service providers. The role of Gauntlet and OpenZeppelin was very pivotal in ensuring that OP deployment happened in a timely manner. Additionally, CGPs role was very supportive in funding initiatives and projects aligned with Compound’s growth. For example, Sommelier and Paloma were funded by CGP to create Compound Integrations.
Closing thoughts
In the last 4 months, the Compound Growth Program and the AlphaGrowth team were able to dive deeper into Compound as a business and were able to identify the areas where the DAO as a business could generate revenue and the platform could achieve growth. We started with a top down approach, tackling the highest priorities first with OP deployment and USDT Markets. The key constraint during the program was time, but as we aim for a year long program, we are confident that we will be able to fully execute programs that will benefit the community.