Hey, Chris, look you really have your mind preoccupied with your idea, which is good thing, but it’s really look like very long explanation to answer you, judging from your question.
Compound website and Compound protocol is very different things to begin with. Website is just a user interface really, it’s not really necessary for it to even exist for people to be able to interact with Compound, you also can use a lot of other interfaces, build and provided by other people or teams to interact with Compound.
Brave rewards is there to reward creators and owners of websites. So technically you can reward owner of compound website and they might use it to like pay for hosting or whatever, but it’s up to them really. Accepting donations might complicate tax management, and might very well be not worth it. Like it could create more work than provide benefit and thus not being efficient.
In any case though, you can reward owner of website, but you can’t reward Compound protocol. It’s different things. website owner is entity, either person, or a company. Protocol is a code on Ethereum. It’s not a entity.
I’m not sure what you mean by “offseting a cost”, as Compound doesn’t charge you anything to interact with it. If you speak about Ethereum network fees, that are not payed to Compound, that is payed to ethereum miners, to actually process your transaction. To make it simple to understand, like for example, you want to deposit some money, like let’s say 1 eth to Compound. That’s how it works basically: You need to send a message to Compound contract that you (your address) want to deposit 1 eth. So you go to a website and press some buttons, and basically website just generate that message for you and present it to your wallet, so you can put your signature on it. Than after you sign it, than wallet send that message to miners so they can process it. That’s when your fee is charged, when miner let Compound contract to process your message, get results and include that in block on blockchain. This fees have nothing to do with Compound itself and have nothing to do with Compound webside either. Both of them don’t charge you anything.
I’d suggest you use bat to reward creators who might actually need and greatly benefit even from small contributions they could get from brave users. Like independent news sites, other content-producing sites out there etc…
Compound is a finacial protocol. It have reserves, growing every day to fund whatever governance find appropriate, as well as really big stash of governance tokens, which do have the value themselfes and can be also used to fund anything. It probably could fund pretty much everything for itself just from own funds. But it also was funded by venture capital to bring it where it is now.
I hope you grasped main idea: it’s not a viable idea to collect rewards from brave. Thing is though, that Compound is decentralised protocol. It’s envisioned to be developed by community, at least i believe that was the idea of founding team. So if you believe it’s very much beneficial, than you can learn how to do it, write necessary code for it, got the approval of governance and see it implemented. I already mentioned where to start:
Website is an interface, the owner is an entity who can collect rewards from brave and use it however he pleased. You can try to convince owner of compound website to collect that, if they find it interesting. Or you can build your own website to interact with compound, and collect rewards yourself. In both cases it would be nothing to do with Compound protocol itself. In second case, it would benefit you and indirectly protocol, as the more UI (user interfaces) are there to interact with Compound protocol, the better it is for decentralisation.