We thank all the community members for their valuable suggestions on defining the Compound Growth Program. Below I have mentioned the finalized version of the proposal, please feel free to share your feedback
Index
- Introduction
- Background
- Proposal
- Scope
- Operations
- Business Development
- Marketing
- Timeline
- Milestones & Deliverables
- Deliverables
- Funding & Budget
- Operational Expenses
- Growth Fund
- Why AlphaGrowth
- Team
- Impact & Transparency
- Links
Introduction
Over the past 6 months, we have chatted with multiple delegates and community members and aggregated the best ideas and strategies on how to grow the Compound protocol. Lack of regulatory clarity limits the ways in which the labs can market the protocol. This has hindered Compound protocol growth. Therefore we propose the Compound Growth Program. This program will secure dedicated personnel and resources for the Growth, BD related activities.
Compound DAO needs a growth partner. We have identified several avenues that will increase Users and TVL which will ultimately drive awareness for the protocol growth:
- Collaborations & Co-Marketing with strategic partners
- Education Campaigns with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) around Compound products
- Increasing the total number of V3 integrations
- Identifying and targeting key opportunities for growth (ie Native USDC on Base)
- New Wallets research & integration to increase the Compound footprint
The growth program will use marketing to publicize Compound products and attract new users to the platform, especially V3. The business development activities will increase the integrations and uses of the platform. The Key areas of focus of the growth program will include: increasing V3 integrations, users, wallets and TVL on the platform. Furthermore, there will be a focus on Marketing activities to enable the protocol to generate awareness and demand for the protocol products. The marketing and BD activities will be backed by robust research, which is also a part of the proposed program structure.
Background
Our initial intentions were to manage the next cycle of the Compound grants program. However as we chatted with more delegates, it became clear that Compound needed a small grants program and a concurrent growth program to onboard new users with successive developments. A missing part in Compound’s operations is the focus on growth/BD-related activities. Compound already has other areas covered thanks to reliable partners in analytics, grants, and security.
- Security: Openzepplin
- Risk analytics: Gauntlet
- Grants: CGP
- Growth: ???
Usually ecosystems, and protocols have an internal BD team to manage the growth activities. Without a dedicated set of personnel and resources to focus on growth, Compound has not been able to keep up with its competitors, such as Aave. The growth program will ensure that Compound will keep up with the industry while still maintaining the conservative nature of the protocol.
Proposal
The Compound Growth program, a trial spanning over a period of 4 months will focus on key areas of growth for Compound Protocol. The Growth program has 2 main areas of focus, BD and Marketing. The AlphaGrowth team has spent the last 6 months discussing the growth requirements of Compound with various community members, delegates and other stakeholders. The program will be a trial run to identify the compatibility of a growth program for Compound. Additionally, this program will also help AlphaGrowth to test different strategies of sustainable growth for Compound
Scope
The overarching aim is to aim at the following-
Marketing
- Publicizing Compound Protocol: Increasing Compound’s presence
- V3 Awareness: Increase general community awareness about V3 and its benefits over V2
- Co-marketing: For new integrations of Compound with other platforms, market the integration to both the communities and DeFi community in general to gather traction for the event.
- Marketing : Paid marketing campaigns
Business Development
- Increase V3 reach: Many V2 integrations are not on V3, push those integrations to V3 as well
- Compound Markets: Integrate Compound markets with different services. Wallets, Exchanges, custodians, etc.
- Dapp integration: Defi applications that can promote activity, users or TVL.
Operations
Business Development
Here are some of the outreach targets for the Growth Program
- V2 to V3 updating
- Infrastructure & Services: Applications and tools that ease the developer onboarding and deployment of Compound to other apps. Many of these have a V2 api/service live. Our aim will be to integrate V3 with them. Some examples are
- Ankr:
- Covalent
- Infrastructure & Services: Applications and tools that ease the developer onboarding and deployment of Compound to other apps. Many of these have a V2 api/service live. Our aim will be to integrate V3 with them. Some examples are
- Existing Pool integrations:
- help existing integrations migrate from V2 pools to V3 Pools
- Argent, which uses V2 pools
- Crypto.com
- Pooltogether
- help existing integrations migrate from V2 pools to V3 Pools
- Compound integration in wallets & Exchanges
- Partner with wallets to provide connection to compound. The majority of wallets are already integrated with Compound, a thrust will be to integrate regional/centralized exchanges with compound markets
- Initiate conversations with certain key centralized exchanges like Nexo, OKX, Kucoin.
- Compound services to institutional custodians
- Custodians that provide services to high asset individuals/organizations (Typical sales deal for custodians is 18 Months, far beyond the trial period of the program, but a successful deal can drastically increase TVL)
- Hex Trust
- Bitgo
- Custodians that provide services to high asset individuals/organizations (Typical sales deal for custodians is 18 Months, far beyond the trial period of the program, but a successful deal can drastically increase TVL)
- Structured Products/Dapp Integrations
- New/existing web3 dapps that increase the uses of Compound Markets/pools. Highly specific and targeted, again key targets will be dapps serving to regional users
- Example- Lemon App that caters to users in LATAM
- New/existing web3 dapps that increase the uses of Compound Markets/pools. Highly specific and targeted, again key targets will be dapps serving to regional users
Marketing
- Compound Content Creation & Education
- Compound Labs being a US-based organization is restricted in its social media scope, so it cannot promote/market any activities on web3 Twitter (Apart from general information sharing through official handle). Compound as a Crypto Platform has no presence in Social media apart from Official handles. No tweet storms, no widespread sharing and retweeting of information by members.
- Promote key updates about the Compound by multiple channels on twitter
- Partner with DeFi KOLs to share information about Compound updates, spread the information about Compound in wider community
- Compound Labs being a US-based organization is restricted in its social media scope, so it cannot promote/market any activities on web3 Twitter (Apart from general information sharing through official handle). Compound as a Crypto Platform has no presence in Social media apart from Official handles. No tweet storms, no widespread sharing and retweeting of information by members.
- V3 Awareness and Demand Generation
- Steady marketing of V3. Many community members are still unaware about the V3 launch, even more people outside Compound in the wider defi community are not yet aware about the enhanced safety and other features about V3.
- V3 Targetted ad campaigns to compound/aave/balancer follower base
- Merge this section with the first section on social media
- Co-marketing for V3 integrations with wallets, exchanges, etc.
- Steady marketing of V3. Many community members are still unaware about the V3 launch, even more people outside Compound in the wider defi community are not yet aware about the enhanced safety and other features about V3.
- Event Driven Marketing, Co-Marketing with with Partners and Integrations
- The team will use events as a major driving factor for the Marketing campaign. Whenever a partnership or integration occurs we will run an event. Co-marketing grows the pie for both partners and the Compound Protocol. We will utilize both Compound’s audience and the Partner audience to drive adoption.
- Compound is integrated with a new dapp
- any new asset is added to the platform
- any new chain integration goes live
- any new pool is updated
- Native USDC comet on Base chain - marketing extensively to Base and L2 communities.
- Launch of Compound on Linea (if it happens within the growth program timeline)
- Integration of a new dapp with extensive user base
- Integrations of Compound markets with new platforms
- These campaigns provide the necessary push to acquire users from the partner’s user base.
- The team will use events as a major driving factor for the Marketing campaign. Whenever a partnership or integration occurs we will run an event. Co-marketing grows the pie for both partners and the Compound Protocol. We will utilize both Compound’s audience and the Partner audience to drive adoption.
- Paid Campaigns
- Multiple Campaigns through various channels to promote Compound products
- KOL promotion: Highly targeted KOL Campaigns for Defi users
- AMAs: involve high value partners
- Sponsorships: i.e. defi edge with 24000 newsletter readers
- Multiple Campaigns through various channels to promote Compound products
Timeline
The original growth program was to span for a period of 6 months. But as discussions on the proposal continued, a consensus was reached on starting first with a ‘trail period’. We plan the BD program to run for a time period of 4 months. The main goal of a trial is to test and experiment on what activity will most help the Compound Protocol.
Milestones and Deliverables
The program will focus on the following parameters to measure its success
- Discover the of Cost of Marketing Spend to increase $1 of TVL
- Discover User Acquisition Cost per User Persona (Whale +$100k, Shark 100-$10k, Minnow under $10k)
- Discover User Acquisition Cost per Integration ( Wallet, dApp, Structured Product)
- Discover which Integrations, Wallets, Partners drive metrics(Fees, Transactions, Users, Volume, TVL)
Deliverables
- 1 new V3 infrastructure service provider integration
- 1 upgrade of V3 infrastructure service provider integration
- A minimum of 2 sponsored content posts to large audiences such as other defi platforms & newsletters
- A minimum of 5 Co-marketing campaigns with existing and new partners
- A minimum of 3 KOL Partnerships
- A minimum of 5 AMAs organized
- Sales pipeline creation
- A goal of 4 meetings every week for integrations and partners, with funnel tracking to conversion
- Conversations with key exchanges on integration
- Conversations with 42+ Dapps for integrations
- Target at least 1,000,000 impressions for marketing campaigns
- Minimum cumulative count of integrated dapp user reach at 1000
- 2-4 new integrations
As we embark on a program to enhance Compound’s growth in the aforementioned metrics, we will be trying out a number of strategies for success. Which makes this an exciting yet challenging task. Not all growth strategies will work, the key aim of the growth program in its trial period will focus on identifying and gathering data on different activities and their rates of success.
a) Finding out which strategies moved the needle for Compound
b) what activities had the highest ROI,
c) identifying the plans that were able to create desirable behavior among target user base.
At the end of the program, we will present this data to the community to evaluate the data. The community should be able to identify, what works, and what doesn’t. What challenges did the growth program encounter during operations?
Funding and Budget
The Compound Growth Program’s budget modeling is similar to Compound Grants Program. The funding ask of the growth program consists of two parts, Operational expenses and the Growth fund.
Operational Expenses
This covers the Growth and BD activities for the program, similar to the Program manager fees on Compound Grants program. This will also include the research activities for the program. Earlier research formed a separate component of the Growth program but after taking suggestions from community members, we included it within the BD part and reduced the scope of research.
The operational expenses for the program are 690 COMP/month
| Activity | Requirement/Month | Program Budget |
|---|---|---|
| BD Operations | 690 | 2760 |
Growth Fund
The growth fund will be the primary vehicle to boost Compound’s presence in the Crypto Communities online. This is similar to the fund of CGP which will be utilized to promote growth via partners.
| Activity | Description | Requirement/Month | Total Requirement | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | Fund used for Marketing. Includes direct marketing, KOL, AMAs, co-marketing, etc. | 690 Comp | 2760 Comp | Unused Funds will be returned |
| Developer fund | Paying certain integrations that can guarantee higher ROI | 2250 Comp | Unused funds will be returned to Treasury | |
| Total | 5010 |
It should be noted that the growth fund is not a grant fund. We envision resorting to using this fund as least as we can. At times some of the integrations will need a development cost by the dapp, at those times
To promote Compound integrations, we currently have 5 routes for financing/boosting integrations
-
Bootstrapping: For majority of the protocols wanting to integrate Compound, the primary thrust will be to negotiate a contract where the full burden of integration falls on the counterparty.
-
Counterparty Grants: For bigger protocols like Balancer, the focus will be to get an integration from such protocols. The integration will be carried out by a partner developer team or anyone in the Compound Community interested in getting the grant and work on the integration.
-
CGP: For protocols not fitting in the above two criteria, the key blocker becomes the cost of integration. In such cases we will help the protocols to apply for the Compound grants program to seal the integration commitment.
-
Developer Fund: Should none of the above three methods provide a way forward for integration of the project. Most of the times we will not push ahead with the integration. But if we feel that a project has the capability of being a major asset as a partner with compound. We want to push ahead with the project and remove the financial bottleneck. For this we require a developer fund which will be able to provide small capital. This fund will be a reserve fund, used sparingly only in a few cases. The growth program will aim to be extremely frugal and conservative with the fund.
-
Matching Incentives Fund: Similar to the the Developer Fund an Incentives Fund can be used to help bootstrap liquidity to a new integration. This will also be used sparingly and to be considered for the best opportunities to bootstrap adoption.
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.
Team
AlphaGrowth consists a team of seasoned Crypto professionals with an extensive network in the industry.
Bryan Colligan: Program and Technical Lead Twitter, Linkedin
Joe Bjornsen: Outreach and BD lead Linkedin
Shardul Pilley: Program manager LinkedIn
Kyril V: Operations and UIUX Linkedin
Michael Borisov: Engineering Linkedin
Vitalii S: Partnerships manager and client success Linkedin
Jose Alfonso: Partnerships and BD Linkedin
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
- Regular reports through Community call on the progress of BD activities
- 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 Development fund.
Links:
| Resource | Link | |
|---|---|---|
| Defi Projects Data | Crypto Analytics & Market Analysis for Web3 | AlphaGrowth | Our platform tracker to rank projects by multiple metrics |
| Compound Overview | Compound & COMP Token Crypto Analytics & User Data | AlphaGrowth | A set of datapoints about Compound Protocol |
| Compound Competitor Watch | Top 5 Compound Competitors & Alternatives, And Similar Lending Projects | AlphaGrowth | Our database of projects that Compares Compound and other Lending projects |
| News | Compound News | AlphaGrowth | News about Compound |