The Compound team seems keen to let the community control the protocol. However, because the vast majority of tokens are still in the hands of a limited set of partners who were gifted the tokens, in reality they are the ones governing the protocol. Users earning COMP of buying COMP have close to no voting power. So if the goal is to have the wider community govern, why not delegate voting power to small holders of COMP.
In short, Compound still has a few million COMP under their control I believe. Setup a way for anyone with a little COMP to get some of that COMP delegated to vote. So your COMP gets like 20x voting power.
There are other ways to do this too. If the goal really is to have the wider community govern, there are many ways to achieve this.
Locking up large parts of the gifted COMP into time-locks.
Encouraging large COMP holders to dump into the market.
Lowering the 1% threshold for making proposals. Maybe change this to 1% of distributed supply.
Is this something the large holder of COMP are interested in exploring?
I’ve voiced this in Discord before. I believe the threshold for proposals should be 100 COMP. I think we are over correcting for spam prevention and under optimizing for participating. Lowering the threshold will incentive holding COMP and improve protocol proposoals.
I agree – the Governance contract has hard-coded parameters, including the vote delay (1 block), voting period (3 days), voting quorum (400k COMP), and threshold to create a proposal (100k COMP), which have been used since the system was first deployed in alpha testing.
All of these can and should be reconsidered now that the governance process is functional. @lay2000lbs deploying a new contract is relatively easy – the key question is what changes the community feels strongest about.
Hey folks, Rafael CEO of TrustToken here. I wanted to voice that I agree with the sentiment here (although 100 COMP might be a bit too low). We do have a sense, from talking with some of the largest $COMP holders, that the high limit on proposing a vote may be preventing some votes from happening that actually do have widespread support and would significantly benefit the platform.
We’ve been proposing for a while to add support for TrueUSD (and at some point other TrueCurrencies as well) to the Compound platform.
We’ve talked privately with some of the folks that hold 100k $COMP, and one thing that surprised us was that the holders we talked with so far do think it would be good for the platform, and would vote in favor if someone else proposed it, but are unwilling to propose the vote themselves for optical reasons. I get where they’re coming from- if you’re a big fish, you have relationships with many projects, including other stablecoins, and you need to think about how it would look for you to be the one to propose a vote for adding TrueCurrencies to Compound. You don’t want to be seen as playing favorites.
While this kind of logic makes complete sense, note that it’s not optimizing just for what’s best for the platform. Large players really do have many other factors they need to consider. Note that we haven’t talked with all of the large holders, and this pattern may not hold for all of them, but we do know that it’s an important factor at least for some.
In votes from the Maker community, adding support for TrueCurrencies has gotten 99%-100% support across 4 different votes for 4 different TrueCurrency products. Part of how Maker gets around the issue with proposal limits is that they have a larger number of indicative votes before the final votes to add assets.
We suspect that an indicative vote (or a lower proposal limit) would show that there is actually widespread support from $COMP holders to add TrueUSD to Compound, but because of how the voting system currently works, it’s difficult to know for sure.