Draft for Compound Growth Program

Proposals
1

Compound Growth Program by Alphagrowth

Contents

  • Why Compound Growth Program
  • Background
  • Proposal Summary
    • Qualifying Chain integrations
    • Qualifying tokens on Compound
    • Partnerships to increase TVL for Compound
    • Assisting Compound Grants program
    • General Growth
    • Deliverables
    • Timeline
    • Funding and Budget
  • Why Alphagrowth
  • Impact and Transparency
  • Links and Research

Why:

We at AlphaGrowth believe that the Compound Protocol will benefit by expanding to more blockchains and supporting more money market pools. We plan to help Compound Community map out and execute a strategy to increase the utility of the Compound Protocol.

Background:

Over the period of the last 3 months, we received feedback from various Compound Community members. Based on our initial interactions with the Compound community, we posted a discussion for the possible direction of the Compound Grants program, by means of RFP method as compared to the current Domain allocator method. Our initial focus was to use Compound Grants as the pivot point to foster the growth of the Compound ecosystem. But as we dived deeper into the requirements of Compound as a platform and came to understand that Compound needs a growth program concurrent to its Grants program. This belief was further solidified after discussions with the Compound delegates who gave us their feedback on possible avenues for Compound’s growth.

Proposal Summary

Through this proposal AlphaGrowth aims to foster growth activity on a series of Chain integrations, token listings and platform partnerships for Compound. The proposal will enable AlphaGrowth to engage in Growth and BD activities for the Compound ecosystem. The core aim is to map, strategize and execute more integrations with quality blockchains and quality token projects as well as opportunities that drive TVL, utility and increase revenue for the Compound protocol.

AlphaGrowth will primarily focus on the following areas for Compound Business Development

  • Growth & Data Research
  • Qualifying Chain Integrations
  • Qualifying Tokens on Compound
  • Partnerships to increase TVL for Compound
  • Assisting Compound Grants Program
  • Marketing Compound’s expansion(Content Creation & Distribution)

Qualifying Chain Integrations

Objective:

Map and score the pipeline of chains to integrate Compound.

Execution:

AlphaGrowth is currently tracking over 50+ EVM based chains as new opportunities for Compound. We aim to target the chains which are in the best interest of Compound to increase TVL, utility and increased revenue.

In this direction, some of the activities that AlphaGrowth will be actively working on are:

  • Research:
    • Conducting market research on the best potential integrations for Compound
    • Leveraging the AlphaGrowth platform’s database containing over 31 million on and off chain data points and connections with 108+ chains. (Links to current research mentioned at the end of this post)
  • Outreach
    • Reaching out to the identified targets, and advocating for Compound’s mission, vision, and proposition. This includes nurturing the prospects and pushing the conversations through the pipeline.
    • Managing the dialogue with potential partners, and getting the prospects to and through the finish line.
  • Sales Engineering
    • AlphaGrowth will work closely with both the prospective blockchains, token projects and the integration teams to analyze the viability of integration.
    • AlphaGrowth will track technical infrastructure requirements to be able to launch Compound with new chains.
  • Negotiations
    • AlphaGrowth will work closely with the risk team and integration teams to facilitate, push and incentivize the process in a win-win-win scenario.

Qualifying Tokens on Compound

Objective :

Getting more tokens listed on the Compound money markets.

Execution:
  • Market Research
    • Scan existing and trending tokens with deep liquidity and healthy metrics for the potential of listing on Compound
    • Use the AlphaGrowth platform’s market tracking algorithm to scan through over 40,000 tracked tokens, identify the best token projects for outreach based on our suite of on and off chain signals.
  • Risk Assessment
    • Perform integration risk checks for target tokens, and collaborate with risk analytics partners to identify all variables associated with token listing
  • Outbounds
    • Once the research and risk analytics phases are concluded, the real fun begins.
    • AlphaGrowth team will reach out to the teams of shortlisted tokens, pushing the narrative for advocating the opportunity of getting listed on Compound
  • Negotiate listing
    • The AlphaGrowth team will work closely with the token teams to ensure a proper timeline of listing
    • AlphaGrowth team will negotiate Protocol Owed Liquidity to help bootstrap and make sure enough liquidity is available on Pool launch

Partnerships to increase TVL for Compound

Objective:

Increasing the TVL on Compound by means of integrations with other DeFi platforms

Execution:
  • Market Research:
    • The AG team will conduct comprehensive research to identify and shortlist the top DeFi platforms for integration with Compound. The research will also consider DeFi platforms on chains that may see support for Compound
  • Outreach and Networking:
    • Once the research and assessment phase is over, the AG team will initiate dialogues with the shortlisted DeFi platforms followed by nurturing the prospects
    • AG will also leverage its own network of DeFi native team members who have a collective network of over 2700+ dApp founders.
  • Integration:
    • The AG team will collaborate with the teams of selected projects to ensure integration and deployment is on track
    • The AG team will also ensure adequate co-marketing campaigns are run with the integrating team to spread awareness for the integration

Assisting Compound Grants program in Applications

The scope of business development for Compound will be incomplete without a close collaboration with the Compound grants program and its operations team (Domain allocators). In our research on Compound’s previous growth and grants initiatives, we identified that a higher quantity of applications can boost the performance of the grants program.

Hence the AG team will be working to closely assist CGP Domain allocators to bring more quality applications to submit for Compound Grants program for their review. It should be noted that the growth program will work in collaboration with the grants program without stepping in the scope of the Grants program. Key to this collaboration will also be granting free access to the domain allocators on AlphaGrowth platform and a deal-flow of 2700+ startups that is being used by 140+ Web3 investors.

General Growth, Data Research and Marketing

Apart from the core growth activities, AG will also engage in auxiliary growth and light marketing efforts to forward Compound’s cause. These will include

  • Twitter AMAs: The AlphaGrowth team will work closely with DeFi communities to organize AMAs featuring Compound Integrations with the Compound labs team. In cases where the Compound labs team is unavailable, either a vetted Compound community member or AlphaGrowth will directly
  • Marketing Materials: Create education materials for DeFi traders on the newest compound offerings. Identify content creators/video makers willing to create quality content in this direction, help them get funding under the CGP. Here’s an example of some of the AlphaGrowth marketing content Gravity Bridge Commercial - YouTube

Deliverables

Over the course of next two Quarters, the Compound Growth initiative powered by AlphaGrowth will aim at the following statistics

  • Chain integrations: Conversations and negotiations with at least 10 chains, starting the integration process and integrating with 2-3 chains.
  • Token integrations: Nurturing partnerships with at least 20 tokens and their core teams. Proceed with getting these tokens supported on Compound subject to approval by Risk analytics partners.
  • CGP Data feed: Support Domain allocators with applications, source 250+ applications from which the DAs can scan and select applications for the next stage.
  • Platform integration: Initiate a minimum 2 DeFi platform partnerships and integrations for the benefit of Compound
  • AMAs: Organize/participate in at least 1 Twitter DeFi AMA per month, Min 6 in 2 quarters.
  • Content Creation: Help create at least 1 video per month to help educate about Compound

Timeline

To ensure that the Growth & BD operations for Compound are a success, the AlphaGrowth team will have to prioritize work into 3 major responsibilities divided in the period of 6 months -

  • Phase 1: Planning and Research
  • Phase 2: Outbounds and Conversions
  • Phase 3: Continuity and Communications

The Initial 45 days will be heavily focused on Planning and research-related works with light outreach and discovery also being done in this time. For the remaining time, the team will primarily work on communications, conversions, negotiations and follow-ups. Between a team of 9 members, we will push nonstop to ensure the success of Compound’s expansion.

Funding and Budget

We propose to initially allocate 18,000 COMP Tokens (0.825% of available COMP) to the Growth Program for 6 months. Out of the 18K allocated, 11K COMP will be transferred back to the COMP treasury if they remain unused. The estimated 6-month operational budget (not including potential performance bonuses) is as follows:

Sr No Category Cost
1 Operations, Research & Data (2 resources) 2,000 COMP
2 Business Development Team (4 resources) 5,000 COMP
3 Marketing (Educational Material Creation & Distribution) 4,000 COMP
4 Liquidity Bootstrap Loans & New Chain Pools 5,000 COMP
5 One-off Reserve Buffer (i.e. Unexpected Expenses, Unexpected/Emergency Operational Expenses) 2,000 COMP
Total 18,000 COMP

For all incentives to be aligned, at the end of this 6-month engagement AG puts a proposal for a performance bonus to be evaluated and voted on by the community. The bonus will have a one year daily vesting schedule. This bonus will also be a signal for AlphaGrowth to proceed and take on further responsibility within the Compound ecosystem.

Note 1: For the Funds allocated for categories 3, 4 & 5 - AlphaGrowth will be conducting a Post-program audit to list out all the expenses incurred in activities associated with these categories.

Note 2: Funds in Categories 3,4 & 5 are returning funds. Any unspent funds assigned to these Categories will be returned back to the Compound Treasury at the end of the time period of the program. An exception to this is the liquidity bootstrap loans that unusually have to be deployed on timescales of more than 6 months, in which case the AG team will continuously update the Compound Community on the status of the funds.

Why AlphaGrowth

We believe decentralization allows for meritocracy. That holds true in the Compound ecosystem as well. We have firsthand experienced the problems that chains and protocols face in their expansion and integration. Our learnings will be pivotal to identifying the risks and benefits associated in various growth strategies for Compound

Operating since 2018, AlphaGrowth has years of experience in DeFi and Crypto BD, We have successfully facilitated business development for multiple protocols including Kava, Sommelier Finance, NEAR, Aurora, and many others.

In our latest engagement with the Kava grants program, the Kava ecosystem witnessed integration with 78 projects and a TVL increase of $80+ Million. Our strategies have shown resilience and success throughout the crypto winter. Over the past year, our BD efforts have led to the deployment of over 150 projects on various blockchains. AlphaGrowth gets deals done, even in the bear.

We have interacted with over 100 ecosystems and 2700+ projects. To facilitate BD and grant deployment, our team built a crypto-native CRM and dashboard enabling us to efficiently evaluate and score opportunities, and report progress on all BD efforts.

Impact and Transparency

At AlphaGrowth, we like doing business in public. We welcome any input or feedback from the Compound community on the proposal.

To keep the community informed on the progress, AG will implement the following tasks to guarantee transparency

  • Monthly reports on the progress of BD activities so far (6 reports)
  • Quarterly Progress reports highlighting various deals in the pipeline, successful integrations, closed deals and learnings (2 reports)
  • A database that gives all the program specific information to the community so that the members can come, verify and inquire about the process.
  • Post program analysis and report about spends on budget categories 3,4 & 5

Links:

Website | Twitter | Linkedin

Some of the examples of our research and data

2 Likes
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Update 1: On the Community call held on Aug 9th 2023, We had presented the proposal to the community

We were lucky enough to get the feedback from multiple community members. Among them here are the 3 points mentioned by @kevin

  1. Engineering side challenges to deploy compound to new chains

  1. Seeing more use cases and integrations with other Dapps ranther than getting on more chains

  2. Budget request for the program being too high

As time was limited, we could not complete the discussion. @kevin we are working on the proposal to address the points, any other point that you wanted to mention?

In order to make the proposal best suited for Compound’s growth and development, we look forward to get your feedback on it. Thanks

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Thanks @sharp and the Alphagrowth team for making this proposal and speaking at the Compound community call. Personally, I would love to see a third-party focused around growth and BD for the protocol. However, I do have some concerns about the current proposal which I will expand upon below.

Chain integrations and token integrations seem unnecessary

These three points cover the crux of my concerns. But I’d like to expand a bit further into the second point:

Compound is in the fortunate position of being a protocol that most chains would probably pay to have as part of their own ecosystem. For many nascent chains, having a bluechip protocol like Compound launch on their platform is arguably a bigger benefit to the chain itself than Compound. Furthermore, with a presence on Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, and, in the future, Optimism, Compound will have a presence on most of the major chains/L2s. There seems to be very little upside for the protocol in this chain-expansion focused proposal. Not only that, the work that the DAO would be paying Alphagrowth $600K+ (11K COMP) for is already currently being done without cost by other chains that want to have Compound on their chain.

A similar argument can be applied to asset listings. Compound has historically been conservative with approving new collateral assets because each new collateral asset adds new risks to the protocol. The bottleneck isn’t in finding new assets to support on the platform. The challenge is in identifying new assets that make sense as collateral for a market. With Compound v3 being out almost a year now, we are now starting to see other teams (e.g. Stader Labs, Rocket Pool) provide their own dev, BD, and growth resources to get their tokens listed on the platform.

tldr: Several chains and assets are already committing their own resources to have Compound be part of their ecosystem. Paying a third-party more than $600K+ to do this (and without the dev resources) does not seem like a good use of the DAO’s funds.

Potential growth opportunities

That being said, I definitely see value in the other suggested growth ideas, such as platform integrations and content creation. I think it makes sense to keep the scope of this proposal smaller.

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Hey @kevin , thanks a lot for the feedback. The first and foremost aim of our discussion was to make our proposal as detailed as possible. To put a spectrum of activities in front of the Community so that the community members give suggestions, approve or disapprove the parts they deem necessary and we make appropriate changes to the proposal based on the suggestions. In this regard your recommendations and honest feedback on the proposal have proven to be a valuable resource.

For the specific Chain integrations section of the proposal, based on the discussions, we are considering scaling down the scope of it. So for the particular topic of Chains, our scope of work becomes explorative in nature as against a previously collaborative nature. Reshifting priorities on research rather than action for this section, ultimately eliminating the cost factor for Compound by delegating research expenses to Chains.

Here is an alternative approach without the Compound Community Bearing the cost.

New section for Chain Research Chain Integrations

  1. Research - Alphagrowth research team lists and reaches out to the top chains in the market, and invites them for an integration viability check.
  2. The integration viability check consists of 3 major parts
    1. Risk analysis: the possible risks that such an integration will present to Compound as well as the Chain.
    2. Security analysis: The security standpoints for any possible integrations
    3. Recommendations and reports by Alphagrowth: These reports will be shared with the Chain and the Compound Community.
  3. Alphagrowth will work with the current Risk analytics (Gauntlet) and security partners(OZ) for Compound (Pending approval from the partners)
  4. The Viability check will only be conducted if the prospective chains are ready to incur the costs of the analysis. Thus the working mechanism will involve the first step of securing a research micro-grant from the requestor chain which will be used for the following purposes-
    1. The grant will be used to cover the operational expenses of Risk and security partners of Compound along with expenses for Alphagrowth
    2. Any unused funds will either be deposited to the Compound treasury or be returned to the Chain treasury
    3. The whole process will not use any monetary resources from Compound either directly or indirectly through the Growth program. The research grant or Viability report will not provide any integration Guarantee to the Grantor chain
  5. The contents of the viability report and the recommendations will be advisory in nature and will not have a binding effect on either the Compound or the Chain. The report will list out the possible contingencies in the integration, along with highlighting the key parameters to help the Compound community and the Chain identify the positives and negatives related to the integration. These reports are supposed to be a guiding star of what the chain standards should be in order to consider integration with Compound.
  6. Irrespective of the contents of the report, the prospective chains will still have to follow the community guidelines and procedures if they wish to proceed with presenting a proposal for integration to the Compound community. The report recommendations may be used as factual evidence to approve or disapprove the Chain’s proposal, nothing mentioned in the report will constitute an endorsement for any particular direction of action.

The way we proceed now is either we completely reduce the Chain focus, or to make it limited to research like the aforementioned sections. @kevin would be glad to know your feedback?

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Hey @kevin, Bryan Colligan founder of AlphaGrowth here. I have been thinking about how to respond for a couple days now. You are a core community member. Without your support and feedback what we are proposing will likely not pass. So, thank you for responding and voicing concerns.

I will try to distill your perspective as best I can. It seems your perspective is Compound should not pay for expansion to new markets. New markets should pay to have Compound expand to them. Also there are concerns in the value to adding new markets at all. Above all the perceived value of new markets is tiny. I think I am understanding your viewpoint, correctly.

In having conversations with Delegates over the last 3 months what we found was that there is a desire for more. More markets, attention and activity. The common narrative among delegates said Compound community was apathetic, lacking momentum and losing market share. From those conversations we had, we put together the best post possible.

We unfortunately have never had a conversation to understand what you would like to see. And would gladly do so to figure out a path forward. But let’s try discovery in public.

There are 4 main objections in your response.

  1. Compound as a bluechip protocol should not need to chase Chains and Assets.
  2. Chains and Assets should provide their own resources to integrate via BD, Dev and growth.
  3. Estimated value of new markets is low.
  4. Price of Services is too high.

Compound is valuable, I know 8 chains that would want compound tomorrow. The main issue is that they do not know how to purchase compound. I do mean purchase because what a chain is purchasing is a brand and distribution. A brand known for code that works, fine tuned risk management and security. The reason why I say they are purchasing a brand is that the code is open sourced and there are now over 100 forks. From the new market perspective the brand associated with Compound is a symbol of trust. Having Compound will motivate more capital and TVL to the new market. Having a new markets listed on Compound is validating. The brand association should have an associated premium, but what is the premium?

On the distribution side having a new markets listed on Compound creates awareness. While there were only ~120 active users in the last 30 days these users have a large amount of capital. Access to these users is very valuable for new markets.

We know Compound has value, new markets are will to pay and deploy resources for said value. They just don’t know how. The process is dense. Purchasers at new markets are told to go to the forums and start a conversation. That is simply not how heads of ecosystem and BD people operate. The way Compound is packaged makes it too difficult to work with. The TAM(total addressable market) of this complexity can quantified. With a napkin calculation of 1.1 Billion of TVL in compound forks and 2.7% in generated fees per year there is $29 Million more fees that can be generated each year for compound users.(point #3)

What we are suggesting is that Compound needs help normalizing and merchandising Compound. The current selection process of new markets feels a bit arbitrary. We believe it is important evaluation of new markets from a quantifiable approach. What parameters matter for integrating new markets and what is the acceptance criteria. We are not looking to opening the flood gates for any and every chain integration with Compound, which seems to be a trigger point for the community. With community feedback we will create a Go-to-Market(GTM) strategy and package Compound in a way which new markets can be evaluated and eventually integrate compound. Currently chains and assets have resources but do not know how to start the process and where to begin. (point #2) The persona acquiring Compound dApp is usually not a developer. They negotiate over calls and after the negotiation they want to know where to send the check to get the job done.

As for our price.

  1. We can slow down the process new market expansion make a research project to work with you and community on the GTM strategy. Map requirements and customers journey on how new markets can effectively deploy resources to integrate Compound. Reduce the BD team to 1 resource.
  2. Separate out Liquidity and Bootstrap Loans after the GTM strategy is approved by the community
  3. Add clarity to the Marketing section on spend vs operation expenses
  4. Lean in and Focus on increasing Compound usage and where to embed the protocol with existing markets.

Is there something else we are missing? If this sounds acceptable we can adjust our ask to this plan.

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@sharp, @bryancolligan thanks for your responses.

You hit the nail on the head. I’d like to re-emphasize that there is a lot of unexplored opportunities to get Compound integrated with other products in the ecosystem and that’s where I personally find the most value for Alphagrowth’s service. New chains and assets will still help to growth Compound, but I’m not sold on Alphagrowth’s value-add here given that Compound is already on most major L2s and Alphagrowth does not have the eng resources to develop any of these proposals.

If Alphagrowth came to the table by saying “we’ll identify the new chains/assets to add to Compound AND we’ll make sure the engineering work is done correctly”, then that seems more valuable of a service. If the offering is just to research these new chains/assets, then the value-add is more limited since the bottleneck for expansion is generally on the engineering side.

That being said, I still find it valuable for the DAO to have a service provider focused on growth. Is Alphagrowth open to a trial period for the DAO to figure out if this is a good fit?

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Aligned. The demand is high from new and existing Chains. So we will identify new chains/assets to add to Compound and leverage external funding (chain/asset grants) to make sure the engineering work is done correctly. While we learn this process, the attention to Chain integrations is projected to be 20-30% of the overall growth program.

Our main focus (80%) remains on finding new distribution channels for existing markets. Then promoting the new partners through marketing and awareness programs with the new embedded channels.

We are also aligned on the idea of a trial period. Understanding that a ramp up time will take a couple weeks we recommend a minimum of a 4 month trial, we are open to suggestions. If this sounds good we will adjust our ask to align to this.

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Compound III has a very elegant code that has been audited by the top security team and has proven itself. I like the idea of coming up with a GTM strategy for the not widely adopted L2. All L2s would want to have at least one lending and borrowing solution and one DEX solution, so they would want to have Compound deployed on them.

It would be great to explore options for an additional revenue stream by licensing the protocol with a fee plus a profit-sharing model for lesser adopted L2s.

So Compound can be both a solution and a market provider for L1 and leading L2s. And the newer L2s can have their own team, or perhaps a Compound partner team, deploy new markets on their chains.

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Thank you for leaning in. Because of the nature of the foundations with token most deals I have seen and put together consist of grants. There are many types of grants and arrangements.

  1. Integration Grants
  2. 0% Loans
  3. Liquidity Incentives
  4. Milestone Grants
  5. Token swaps
  6. Liquidity Pooling

A Goal will be to standardize how a new chain can integrate Compound after a risk & technical requirements analysis. What kind of incentives, grants and or token swaps will be needed after risk assessment is a goal.

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It’s great to see quality ideas and proposals for expanding Compound’s reach, and I’d be happy to work with Alphagrowth as a CGP domain allocator if both proposals ultimately pass. I agree that Alphagrowth’s proposal is largely complementary to CGP; in defense of that claim, I want to highlight what I see as one of the areas that might be seen as an area of potential overlap, namely content creation.

In the most recent round, my CGP domain (Protocol Ideas and Dapps) approved a small handful of proposals focused on content creation, outreach, and/or education, cumulatively between 10-20% of the domain’s activity. Proposals in this area were not explicitly among the high priorities listed in the program details for this domain. I raise this example because it is offers an example of why the CGP 2.0 team felt it was important for the program detail documents to include examples of high-priority RFPs but at the same time allow for builders to bring their ideas and explore alignment with the relevant CGP domain. We also felt such content creation efforts were important for Compound but would not be eligible for CGP support if they could not be supported within this domain.

I think it would be net-beneficial to see most content creation efforts shifted out of CGP Protocol Ideas and Dapps to become part of a more streamlined initiative under Alphagrowth’s proposal. There may still be value in supporting some high-quality but smaller, community-led education and outreach initiatives, so perhaps independent builders with ideas in this area could consult with both Alphagrowth and CGP to determine whether their ideas would make sense as part of the Alphagrowth content thrust or as a standalone effort under CGP.

I agree with @kevin about the limited utility of research on chain and asset growth in the Alphagrowth proposal. While it’s possible in principle to deploy the Comet contracts on any EVM-compatible blockchain, the vast majority of them lack certain critical infrastructure to support a full Compound III deployment (Chainlink price feeds being the primary example). Between existing and in-development deployments, I don’t believe it’s an exaggeration to say that the cumulative TVL of chains on which Compound III markets are (or will soon be) deployed represents well over 90% of TVL across all EVM-comatible blockchains (excepting BNBchain and Tron, I suppose). The majority of value unlock in chain/asset growth would be development efforts to make more chains Compound-ready, which is really more up to the chains’ developer communities than it is to Compound.

On budget: a 1Q trial period with 500 COMP to ops/research/data, 1500 COMP to BD, 500 COMP to content creation, and 500 COMP of buffer for a total of 3000 COMP makes more sense to me. At current market rates, this USD equivalent of ~$126k to Alphagrowth for three months would amount to roughly 50% of the $252k in grants that CGP 2.0 awarded across its six months of operation. In other words, the funding rate to Alphagrowth would be roughly equal to that of all CGP-approved proposals combined. I hope that comparison helps place the proposal size in context and helps justify why the size I’m suggesting is 1/6 of what was requested (albeit for only half the requested period).

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Thank you for taking time review the proposal and sharing your valuable feedback. CGP and the Growth program both offer unique propositions which have the potential to enable the advancement of Compound as a platform and service. In this regard I find both the programs to be uniquely placed to have distinguised priorities yet closely alligned on a lot of topics. The complimenting nature of the two programs will offer a holistic opportunity for development & growth to the community.

The key constituents of the growth program are Research, BD and Marketing. The focus for Marketing will be to drive awareness relating to new Compound integrations, target onboarding of users of integrated platforms, and spotlight on methods to get targets to use the platform. I am aligned with your views @allthecolors on handling content and marketing. There might be some community driven educational content that may fit better with CGP due to their scope and KPIs. A close cooperation would guarantee the best results as you mentioned.

We are also aligned on reducing the scope of the growth program wrt chains as suggested by @allthecolors and @kevin in the previous replies.

On the topic of duration, I however believe a program duration of minimum 4 months would allow us to make any meaningful impact. As negotiations and finalization take months, even more in case of negotiations with other DAOs. Ideally we would have requested 6 months.

Thank you for the budget suggestions, the BD+Research budget requirements are in line with the suggestions in your earlier comment (~800 Comp/Month). The Marketing budget reflects calculations based on several factors including distribution channels and KOLs, which is why the budget extends to a monthly ask.

We have bifurcated the budget into two parts, based on our internal forecasts, analysis and previous engagements-

  • The BD+ Research Budget

    • 115 Comp/Month: Research, operations and reporting
    • 689 Comp/Month: DB, Partnerships and outbound campaigns

  • Marketing budget

    • 689 Comp/Month

The Marketing budget will be publicly audited, any unspent marketing funds will be returned to the Compound treasury at the end of the program.

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I actually believe that Alphagrowth’s proposal should be completely different. As they themselves noted:

Therefore, the proposal should be heavily reliant on commission based on successful large and important integrations rather than monthly fee. If not, Compound community will fall to issue of sunk cost and mismatched incentive.

This is another important point that doesn’t match well with leading DeFi DAOs like Compound. KOLs are more for speculation focused. And one can argue many of these might even on promoting scams. How would approaching these help Compound? Also if the team believes that will actually drive users to use compound, any viable KOL example that you can share?

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Hey Doo, thank you for the recommendations.

Re: Separate proposal
Initially, we had a focus on Grants program. But as we shifted our focus to the Growth Program, we were already aiming for a separate proposal.

Re: Commission-based approach
I think this is a good idea. Alphagrowth follows a Commission based approach with the ecosystem partners. These still involve a monthly retainer style contract. What are your thoughts on a commission framework? The idea had crossed our minds before. The only blocker I see is that the retainer contracts include quick execution and close collaboration with the core team, but with no central executing authority in Compound, we did not find this the best working arrangement

Re: KOL and marketing
The thrust of the KOL section is not on Compound education, but integration specific marketing, ie event-driven, action-inducing marketing (Not to be confused with in-person event marketing) Lets say, we get V3 integrated with Balancer (Event!). In this case, the focus will be on attracting Balancer native defi users to use the integration or use compound directly. Its not general compound marketing, everyone knows compound. But everyone is not aware about the new integrations of compound (esp outside compound community), the information about such events needs to be spread in the defi community to gain maximum effect.