GFX Labs' Proposal To Become Contributors

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GFX Labs’ Proposal To Become Compound Contributors

Objective

Mission

Compound’s objective is to provide a market where users can lend and borrow against their assets in a permissionless, trustless, and secure way.

Feature

A core tenet of Compound is that participants can use the protocol to enter and exit without seeking the approval or validation of anyone. It is available to anyone, anywhere, is completely open-source, and preserves liquidity so users can utilize the protocol for an instant or a year without a difference in pricing. In contrast to a central coordinator/underwriter of loans in traditional finance, Compound’s loan terms are the same for all users and available to everyone – with no regard to work history, geography, or even credit score.

COMP

The COMP token and its holders represent the governance of the Compound market. The contracts that define on what terms participants interact with Compound are owned by the protocol and upgradable by governance. Those contracts include everything from the interest rate model, which selects the supply and borrow rates, to the Comptroller, which contains the core protocol logic. In addition to upgrading existing contracts, governance can add new assets (contracts) to the protocol and develop additional products.

Governance

For Compound to succeed, the protocol needs to support assets from which the market wants to earn interest or to borrow for a fee, and provide competitive interest rates to both sides of the market. Supporting new assets and providing competitive rates is ultimately a risk management task. Governance needs to maintain the existing supported assets while continuing to add new assets as the market evolves. It is the responsibility of governance to manage those risks while continuing to innovate.

Revenue

The reward for COMP holders (the governors of the protocol) for successfully performing risk management is the prospect of fees paid by users to the protocol. The oft-forgotten Reserve Factor (RF) defines the portion of the borrower’s interest that is paid to the protocol. The Reserve Factor is moderated by governance and can be anything from 0% to 100%, but typically is 25% for altcoins.

Price, Reserves and Dollar value of Reserves1200×742 55.9 KB

Today the protocol reserves are worth about $41m and consist mostly of DAI (RF: 15%) and USDC (RF: 7%). Assuming that the protocol usage remains constant, the reserves will increase by approximately $17m over the course of a year. However, the protocol spends roughly $100m/year on COMP incentives (one of our prior posts COMP Distribution Speeds - The End of CompSpeeds? discusses COMP incentives). We believe the protocol can significantly reduce (or end) the current COMP incentives and become substantially more efficient.

That brings us to the shortcomings of governance and the current state of the protocol. The protocol is largely unattended. While this is helpful from a decentralization perspective, it isn’t sustainable if Compound is to survive, much less thrive. Crypto and DeFi are still-nascent industries that will continue to evolve rapidly, and Compound must evolve with them.

To-Do

We have developed a To-Do list for the protocol to return to a dominant market position and set forth on a path to profitability.

  1. End COMP rewards. There is ~$1B of capital in Compound providing little value to the protocol beyond printing a higher TVL at the cost of $100m in COMP a year. While the original intention of COMP incentives was to disperse COMP to its users, the incentives have brought in mercenaries that claim and sell COMP.
  2. Refactor COMP incentives to be used to bootstrap liquidity in new markets and scale back as liquidity enters.
  3. Seek liquidity from other protocols like MakerDAO via their Direct Deposit program. GFX Labs has successfully pushed forward a Dai Direct Deposit Module for Compound that will conservatively bring to the protocol a 100 million DAI credit line that is insensitive to liquidity mining rewards. GFX Labs plans to propose a similar program for USDC and USDP, though they are more complex from MakerDAO’s perspective and require more time and collaboration to prepare. Compound currently spends $38m in COMP incentives on the DAI market and another $38m on the USDC market. Sourcing liquidity from MakerDao can lead to substantially reducing stablecoin incentives.
  4. Add supply caps. While the protocol currently has borrow caps to lower governance hijacking risk, the protocol can similarly add supply caps to limit the amount of an asset that can be deposited to the protocol. Similar to MakerDAO’s debt ceilings, supply caps provide governance with an additional tool to manage asset risk. Adding a supply cap mitigates the protocol’s concern of an infinite-mint attack and empowers the protocol to onboard assets it might not otherwise support.
  5. Add more assets. The protocol makes money by supporting markets that are in demand. With the addition of supply caps, the protocol can support more assets, since it can better manage risk.
  6. Improve the oracle system to support more assets. The existing oracle system only supports assets with a Uniswap v2 market. GFX Labs has been working with Chainlink to develop UniswapAnchorView (UAV) v3 contract, which switches the protocol’s anchor to Uniswap v3. While this does support more markets, it is still somewhat limiting. Adding Balancer and other markets as available anchors will grow the range of assets Compound can safely support. In addition, the protocol should develop tooling to support other popular assets such as LP tokens and token derivatives. There are a number of large (by MCAP) assets the protocol could support that the market wants to use as collateral, such as wSTETH, that could significantly increase protocol revenues.
  7. Deploy Compound v2 to L2s and sidechains. Interacting with the protocol is expensive on mainnet and can crowd out users who do not have the scale of capital to justify the gas expenses. Deploying Compound on Polygon, Optimism, and other networks would grow the protocol beyond Ethereum and put competitors at bay.
  8. Transition off Legacy CTokens. The ETH, USDC, ZRX, & BAT markets are all running on a non-upgradable legacy ctoken contract. While WBTC has already migrated, the other markets have not. The protocol is currently missing out on additional revenue by not being able to configure those markets with the improved interest rate model, set a kink in the interest curve for ETH, ZRX, & BAT, and protocol liquidation fee. Generally, this change is easy and only has upside for the protocol.
  9. Interest rate curves. Every interest rate curve utilized is the original interest curve chosen when the cToken was first configured (except DAI, which was updated on July 28th, 2020). This is a critical piece of Compound’s borrow/lend market, and yet the protocol has done little to research alternative curves or test the interest rate curves already utilized.
  10. Deprecate old markets. Compound v2 is nearing 1000 days old. The crypto landscape has changed significantly over the last few years, and just as Compound needs to adapt to what participants want today, governance also needs to offload what isn’t required or safe to support. Depreciating REP & SAI, closing down legacy markets, and managing risk on older markets such as BAT & ZRX is important to maintaining the protocol.
  11. Update the liquidation system. The efficiency of the close factor and liquidation system as a whole hasn’t been researched meaningfully or iterated upon. As a critical component of the protocol, it needs more dedicated resources.
  12. Upgrade testing and developer code base. While Compound’s codebase and testing was state of the art at its launch, it has since fallen behind. Without a clear, incentivized, and responsible party to improve and maintain the tools, they have become hard to work with and outdated, which has hurt development efforts.
  13. Clean up the existing protocol. The Comptroller needs to be cleaned up and possibly entirely refactored. Similar to the prior point, the codebase was innovative at launch but has since fallen behind without incentivizing someone to improve the system.
  14. Separate revenue generation and risk management. Reserve factors should be optimized to balance protocol revenue and liquidity.
  15. Rebalance reserves. The stock of reserves should be adjusted periodically to minimize risk. Compound is not in the business of taking positions and should seek to offload the surplus of volatile assets for stablecoins or even COMP.

The v2 protocol has a lot that could be improved. While it has made progress with community members contributing individual improvements, it lacks a concerted, focused effort.

Proposal

GFX Labs is offering its services to improve the protocol and build a concerted effort for the community. We have in-depth experience in Compound, the competing money markets, DeFi, and crypto markets as a whole. At GFX Labs, we are building a team with a wide range of skill sets and using those resources to develop products and improve DeFi. One of the most valuable things about our team is that we genuinely believe in DeFi and want to build a better financial system.

About

GFX Labs isn’t a fund. We don’t hold positions. We are a team of builders who love DeFi. Our participation in governance is rooted in a desire to see DeFi overtake legacy finance. We promise to be active participants who improve the protocol by action and input. We’ll promote innovation and provide constructive comments on proposals we disagree with. Our door will always be open to those who share our passion for DeFi & Compound.

Getty and Eddy, the two founders of GFX, are active contributors to Compound and have already made several proposals.

  • 24: The first Compound Autonomous Proposal which raised the WBTC CF to 60%
  • 36: Raised the WBTC CF to 75%
  • 47: Oracle Improvement: lead a long-term effort to substantially upgrade the oracle system.
  • 51: Getty became the first contributor to earn a streaming grant for his work on the oracle improvement.
  • 53: Added MKR and organized a new price oracle to support MKR, AAVE, SUSHI, & YFI. Note: MonetSupply sponsored the proposal.
  • 54: Added AAVE, SUSHI, & YFI. Note: Polychain sponsored the proposal.
  • 56: Set collateral factors for MKR, SUSHI, AAVE, YFI, & LINK.

Notably, Getty started hosting the Compound Community Call last March and has been hosting them bi-weekly as a casual place for the community to talk about Compound.

In addition to Compound, GFX Labs spends material time on MakerDAO & Uniswap. We have worked on the last three proposals at Uniswap, including the proposal to introduce 1bp fee tiers, which has significantly improved stablecoin trading at Uniswap and taken market share from Curve. At MakerDAO, we have successfully pushed forward a Dai Direct Deposit Module for Compound that will conservatively bring a 100 million DAI credit line to the protocol. GFX Labs is planning to propose a similar program for USDC and USDP, though they are more complex from MakerDAO’s perspective, and require more time and collaboration to prepare.

Compensation/Incentives

The issue of compensation for contributors has been discussed in the community a few times, and is often the pain point of a proposal. Ultimately, it is incentives that drive resources or the lack thereof in the instance of many protocols’ governance/improvements. While “prestige” or the joy of interacting with the protocol is certainly there, it isn’t a scalable or long-term plan for innovation. Much of what is required to maintain a protocol isn’t sexy work. As a decentralized protocol, Compound needs to continue to experiment with incentives.

Opportunity Cost

The existing incentives in crypto/DeFi are such that if you are a team with skills, you should raise a round and launch a project. The next best thing is probably to join an existing team. Or, if you know DeFi well, you can go the finance route and join/start a trading firm. Governance compensation has hardly begun to compete with the opportunities available in the rest of the industry. However, it has been remarked upon many times how governance improvements are greatly accretive, because if a small parameter change can improve the token price by even 1%, that can represent tens of millions of dollars of value created. The value that could be created by building out a product could be immense for the protocol.

KPIs

KPIs are regularly used to guide a subjective process towards an objective one. By assigning clear and measurable goals, the protocol can incentivize contributors to work towards the desired outcome. We propose a base compensation and performance bonuses that are paid if specific KPIs are met.

Incentivized KPIs sometimes have adverse effects due to short-term interest. A CEO has significant power and lateral ability to achieve the KPIs they are incentivized to hit in a traditional company. While they might report to a board, they still have relatively little oversight. However, GFX Labs is still at the behest of Compound governance, and every change that we propose must be explicitly authorized by an on-chain vote. We thus believe that KPIs will allow us to strive to meet the high bar of safety, efficiency, and innovation that governance demands.

Possible KPIs include:

  • Token price: a lot of noise but ultimately the thing everyone cares the most about.
  • Revenues: a clear indicator of the efficiency and sustainability of Compound.
  • TVL: helpful to see how trusted a product is but manipulatable by rewards programs.
  • Dollar value borrowed: represents usage and affects revenues but manipulatable by rewards programs.
  • Assets supported: While more choices are good for users, they might not be good for the security and safety of the protocol.
  • Market share: the percentage of market share Compound has in money markets.
  • Governance proposals: might be a good low bar but easily exploited.

While each of these options has its pros and cons, we think protocol revenues and token price best align us (the contributor) and the protocol. Revenues are something we are confident we can grow, and it is hard to manipulate. The token price is ultimately what holders care the most about. In regards to the external risks of using the token price as a KPI, the trade-off is simple: we can work really hard, and the price might not move, and thus we lose, or we could work really hard, and the price might go up and thus pay us more than what governance believes is justified. In the bear case, GFX takes the hit, and in the bull case, everyone wins. While progress and innovation should drive the token price up, we think most will agree that crypto is wild and not everything is easily explainable. We believe the other KPIs are more manipulable and less inefficient as metrics of our performance.

In addition to the KPI compensation, we also ask for a base compensation. In a sense, this is to guarantee that we have enough resources until what is hopefully the largest part of the compensation is realized after we hit the KPIs.

Token/Stablecoin

An interesting point of debate in governance compensation is what to pay with: governance tokens or stablecoins. Below is a simplified view of the trade-offs from the protocol’s and contributor’s point of view. We think it is in Compound’s best interest to pay contributors in stablecoins and not push more COMP into circulation. However, if governance feels strongly that it makes sense to pay in COMP, we would ask for a premium relative to the stablecoin price.

Protocol paying Pro Con
Governance Token The contributor’s payment is tied to the token price. Efficient if the protocol thinks their token is overvalued. The protocol is putting more tokens into circulation and diluting the existing holders.
Stablecoin Existing holders aren’t diluted, and the cost/payment is exact. The contributor isn’t tied to the protocol.
Contributor collecting Pro Con
Governance Token Uncertain as to what the value is.
Stablecoin Knows exactly what they are getting paid.

Compensation

Below is our proposed compensation structure. Since we think we can increase protocol revenues by 50% over the course of a year, we wish to let our base-fee cover up to a 50% increase. We earn bonus payments when we improve the revenues beyond 50% and the price of COMP increases. Both KPIs have to be met to earn the bonus. For example: if protocol revenues were to increase by 200% (very difficult in our opinion), and the token price was above $600, our bonus would be $30m. If the token price were above $600, but revenues had only increased by 100%, we would earn a $10m bonus. If revenues were to increase to 200% but the token price was $400, we would earn a $20m bonus. This model ensures that we only get paid if protocol performance has increased, and we do not become reliant solely on price. While certainly not a perfect model, it has good trade-offs which we believe properly align us with the improvement of the protocol.

Revenue Increase COMP Price Bonus
75% $100 $5,000,000
100% $200 $10,000,000
125% $300 $15,000,000
150% $400 $20,000,000
175% $500 $25,000,000
200% $600 $30,000,000
225% $700 $35,000,000
250% $800 $40,000,000
275% $900 $45,000,000
300% $1,000 $50,000,000

We propose $5m USDC streamed to us for our base fee over the period (1 year). While a guaranteed income would be preferred, we are willing to trust Compound governance. We will commit to completing/quarterbacking at least 6 of the items on the above to-do list. At the end of the period, if we have met any of our KPIs (revenue and token price), we’ll ask Compound Governance to award us our bonus. While a year may be a long time in crypto, we realize the community may be interested in us participating for another term or committing to a longer period. We’re open to exploring that and are submitting this proposal as a starting point for governance to consider.

We think Compound and GFX Labs can have a symbiotic relationship that is profitable for both parties. We look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on this unique proposal.

Compound v3

As long-term Compound participants, we are looking forward to seeing Compound Labs bring Wednesday’s announcement of v3 to life. We look forward to assisting with v3 as more information is shared about the new protocol’s timing, progress, and requirements. However, the v2 protocol differs significantly from v3. The announced protocol only has one borrowable asset, such as USDC, and thus one interest rate curve. While the protocol is excellent for participants who want to supply multiple assets as collateral and only borrow USDC, it is not a general money market like v2. Until the full vision of Compound Cash is built, we think v2 should be continued to be maintained, tuned, and improved.

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100% support this initiative. The base price is very fair given the importance of the todo items and the benefits they would have for keeping Compound up to date. Ultimately someone will have to spearhead these items and they will need a budget, and GFX labs has shown good faith in this area for a long time. The risk of not doing this is too high to ignore.

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This is an awesome proposal, and I am totally on board with the to-do list articulated here. I have some specific questions on the compensation structure/KPIs, which I think can be refined, but generally speaking think it’s well designed. My biggest question would be how to best align v2 initiatives outlined here with some of the v3 roadmap that was laid out earlier this week. For example, is it going to get confusing or muddled from a user perspective (and result in even more fractured liquidity) if a Compound v2 protocol is launched on something like Arbitrum, and then a Starport with only one borrowable asset is launched on Arbitrum a month later? How much of the work here will be relevant & reusable in v3? And realistically is the goal of the v3 roadmap to end in the deprecation of the v2 protocol?

Overall very supportive of this initiative.

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A developer team investing meaningful labor/resources into a protocol like Compound deserves clear terms and a contract with a runway sufficient to engage in more than short-term planning. This proposal seems like a solid step in that direction. Of course it also helps that GFX Labs and its leadership have been such active long-term contributors!

Here are a couple of questions to consider:

(1) Is it in Compound’s best interests for GFX Labs, or any one organization, to tackle all 15 of the items on the suggested to-do list? I think it’s a solid list, and Getty and Eddy are clearly well-qualified to tackle most items on it. But I wouldn’t want the adoption of this proposal to preclude the protocol from hiring other teams to work on items that may be a bit more outside of GFX Labs’ usual wheelhouse. An example that comes to mind is the interest rate curve research: that work strikes me as benefitting from a very different skill/experience set than what’s needed for most of the other items and could be tackled without deep knowledge of the complete protocol codebase. Maybe some detail on how GFX Labs envisions prioritizing these items and/or how we would make space for others to come in and tackle a subset of these items would help address this question for me.

(2) Can the protocol afford the services as proposed? Over the past year interacting with governance, I’ve learned that my barometer for the market value of this work is way off, so to be clear, I’m not questioning whether the pay rate is reasonable. Rather, I’m asking whether the protocol can afford to pay GFX Labs its base fee and bonus in the most optimistic scenario, or even in the base case scenario:

  • I’m assuming the base fee and bonus would both come from protocol reserves, because that’s the protocol’s only source of the requested payment vehicle (USDC) unless it sells off COMP, which would go against the proposal’s intent to “not push more COMP into circulation”.
  • Using the numbers in the proposal, the protocol currently holds 29.4% of ~$41M, or a little more than $12M USDC in its reserves. Assuming constant protocol usage as in the proposal, the protocol accrues 29.4% of $17M, or $5M USDC annually to reserves.
  • Said another way, for their base fee, GFX Labs is requesting all new USDC reserves accrued over the one-year contract in a no-change-in-revenue scenario (= $5M).
  • Assuming GFX Labs is successful at increasing revenues by 50%, the protocol will retain this extra renevue (across all markets, which is the silver lining) at the expense of 100% of the USDC revenue it would have accrued without this proposal.
  • But then we have to consider where the funds for the performance bonus would come from. Let’s take the 75% revenue increase, $100 COMP price example (= $5M bonus). In this scenario, the protocol would take in an extra 0.75*$5M = $3.75M USDC to reserves, but would owe GFX labs $5M USDC in bonus payments. The extra USDC revenues aren’t sufficient to cover the performance fee, so we would need to tap into prior years’ accrued reserves and/or swap other stablecoin reserves for USDC just to pay the bonus.
  • Any improvements in the price of COMP would exacerbate this problem, as the price of COMP doesn’t directly affect available reserves (yes there is probably some correlation, but it is indirect and sublinear). The only way the protocol would be able to pay the bonus would be to sell COMP, again contradicting the positioning about not diluting token holders.
  • The situation just gets more untenable as we go up the KPI chart.

Regarding point (2), in short, unless my math is wrong here, I think the bonus incentive needs to be paid in COMP (or the size of the bonus significantly reduced) to make this proposal viable without risking a full drain of the protocol’s USDC reserves.

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Getty and GFX Labs have been key players in contributing to the protocol over the past year. They’ve

  • Added markets,
  • Coordinated with Chainlink to improve the oracle system,
  • Adjusted CFs and COMP speeds,
  • Facilitated and provided discussion,
  • Helped me diagnose and disclose these COMP speed bugs, and
  • Were one of the top responders to the proposal 62 bug, partaking in damage control, diagnosis, and recovery

Compound Labs has done a phenomenal job in creating such an excellent product. Hats off to them and all of the developers (I may criticize the codebase and the state of things a lot, but please know I love and respect all of you)! Now, while I believe Compound protocol is great as is, it’s important to realize how early we are in the adoption of DeFi.

I think DeFi, in general, has so much room to grow - Compound as well. In order to continue growing Compound and to retain our position as an industry leader, much effort is needed. While Compound Labs is building Compound Treasury and Gateway, I think there will still be demand for the existing protocol and its future iterations. With that being said, GFX Labs has done an excellent job in outlining the TLC the protocol needs.

GFX Labs’ TODO list is extensive and it’ll take a lot of resources to accomplish all of those high-value items. It certainly won’t be cheap - they’ll need to hire a significant amount of people in a variety of different roles, and in a rapidly growing and competitive industry.

I plan to also submit a proposal similar to GFX Labs’. Together, our firms will work together to complete the items on GFX Labs’ TODO list and more. We’ve already been working together for almost the past year - listing additional markets, building and improving processes/requirements, oracle improvements, and more. With our combined skill sets (for reference, I created a product and bootstrapped a business about 12 years ago which I exited last year and is still profitable under different ownership), I believe working together on the protocol will have a Compounding effect. But this proposal isn’t about that, so back to GFX Labs’ proposal.

I think we can all agree that Getty and GFX Labs has already provided value to the protocol, that their TODO list is of high importance, and that GFX Labs consistently executes. So the big question is what is the right amount of compensation?

I think the requested base fee of $5M for a year will provide GFX Labs with sufficient financial security to commit resources in maintaining, growing, and improving the protocol. I think the work GFX Labs has already done and is planning on doing will well exceed $5M in long-term value for the protocol.

However, I have some quims about the proposed bonuses. There can be many reasons other than GFX Labs’ work that can cause the price of COMP to increase - macro sentiments and changes, Compound Labs’ work, BTC correlation, overall industry growth, marketing and PR, TVL changes, COMP distribution changes, other key players’ work, etc. The same can be roughly said for revenue increases.

Then, of course, there’s the question of whether Compound has the resources to pay those high bonuses, and where to draw the money from.

I think it would be best to drop the bonus compensation and work with only the base fee. At the end of the 1-year term, GFX Labs can then renegotiate a new work contract using the past year’s work as justification for any increases or decreases in compensation.

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We would love to tailor the to-do list more towards v3; however, we thought it would best to reference the existing protocol with the limited information available. GFX’s services are tied to the productivity of the overall protocol. We’ll work on the improvements/issues that we believe are most important to the protocol.

From our perspective, the v2 (current version) and v3 (announced last Wednesday) can co-exist because v3 isn’t a general money market like v2. As v3 develops, we’ll certainly look to contribute to it.

Thank you!

We would love to see other contributors participate in protocol development. There is a ton of work to be done, and while I wish we could do all of it, we don’t have the resources to act as an external core team. In an ideal world, the protocol has a team of contributors improving the protocol.

The base fee can come from the existing protocol reserves and be streamed via Sablier. As for the performance bonus, the protocol will have three main choices: USDC reserves (or a mix of stablecoins), borrow USDC using COMP, sell COMP for USDC (the protocol or us). If we hit a KPI, we’re confident the protocol will be in a position to pay the bonus.

Love it! The more the merrier!

When we think about allocating resources, we think about the risk/reward, and when we offer our services to a protocol, we expect voters to think similarly. Voters want to know they are getting the most for their money, and the servicer wants to get paid the most possible. We chose the base+bonus model because it is a tried and tested one. We manage some risk by taking a base and putting the rest on the bonus, whereas the protocol gets more bang for its buck because we only get paid the bonus if the protocol is improving. Without the bonus, we would have to increase the base to meet the risk/reward we want, and in turn, we believe it would hurt the voters’ risk/reward.

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At a high level, Gauntlet believes that contributors are important to the growth and success of a leading money markets protocol like Compound. GFX has been a great contributor to the community and we are excited to see this proposal. We could be supportive of the proposal, but suggest a few changes to scope below.

We believe that GFX Labs can drive an impact on handling the operational overhead of protocol development. For example, upgrade testing and refactoring the developer code base are areas where GFX can make a highly valuable contribution to Compound.

At the same time, it’s really difficult to weigh in on a proposal with:

  1. Such a broad, heterogeneous scope
  2. No information on the intended methodology for these various initiatives

We suggest the following changes:

  1. Remove items that duplicate work by other contributors. For instance, Gauntlet has already committed to managing the reserve factors and has published a detailed methodology here. OpenZeppelin and Gauntlet have already agreed to evaluate risk (market and smart contract) for new assets - but it would be great for GFX to do the dev work to create these proposals and set up oracles, etc.

  2. Provide basic information on what success looks like for each initiative

  • For instance - COMP reward management. It’s hard to support this in the current state as there’s no info on what this would entail.

  1. Reduce the work to two key programs (a and b below) and allow the community to vote on them separately, as they are two very different services in nature. You could group the 15 work items into a couple of buckets:

    a) Protocol development work

    b) COMP reward management

    c) Laundry list of parameter changes and management

    GFX has strong experience with a), and it’s high priority for the protocol to address b). However, the addition of c) adds risk by increasing scope and it’s not clear why GFX might be successful with this work, as @allthecolors and other community members have noted. Even if someone had deep experience here, we’d hope they would provide more info on methodology and what infrastructure they have built to support the ongoing management of IR curves and similar quantitatively driven optimizations.

  2. Provide more info on how GFX will work with the community to ensure they are building the right solutions for the protocol. For instance, if you want to list new assets, there might not be a need for supply caps at all. How will you prioritize these initiatives over the next year? How will you work with other community developers as well?

Initiative Bucket Next Step
1 End COMP rewards. There is ~$1B of capital in Compound providing little value to the protocol beyond printing a higher TVL at the cost of $100m in COMP a year. While the original intention of COMP incentives was to disperse COMP to its users, the incentives have brought in mercenaries that claim and sell COMP. COMP Reward Management Provide more info & methodology
2 Refactor COMP incentives to be used to bootstrap liquidity in new markets and scale back as liquidity enters. COMP Reward Management Provide more info & methodology
3 Seek liquidity from other protocols like MakerDAO via their Direct Deposit program. GFX Labs has successfully pushed forward a Dai Direct Deposit Module for Compound 3 that will conservatively bring to the protocol a 100 million DAI credit line that is insensitive to liquidity mining rewards. GFX Labs plans to propose a similar program for USDC and USDP, though they are more complex from MakerDAO’s perspective and require more time and collaboration to prepare. Compound currently spends $38m in COMP incentives on the DAI market and another $38m on the USDC market. Sourcing liquidity from MakerDao can lead to substantially reducing stablecoin incentives. COMP Reward Management N/A, this seems pretty straightforward
4 Add supply caps. While the protocol currently has borrow caps to lower governance hijacking risk, the protocol can similarly add supply caps to limit the amount of an asset that can be deposited to the protocol. Similar to MakerDAO’s debt ceilings, supply caps provide governance with an additional tool to manage asset risk. Adding a supply cap mitigates the protocol’s concern of an infinite-mint attack and empowers the protocol to onboard assets it might not otherwise support. Development Work Cut. Happy to discuss further but this just does not appear to be an additive risk lever
5 Add more assets. The protocol makes money by supporting markets that are in demand. With the addition of supply caps, the protocol can support more assets, since it can better manage risk. Development Work N/A, Sounds great
6 Improve the oracle system to support more assets. The existing oracle system only supports assets with a Uniswap v2 market. GFX Labs has been working with Chainlink to develop UniswapAnchorView (UAV) v3 contract, which switches the protocol’s anchor to Uniswap v3. While this does support more markets, it is still somewhat limiting. Adding Balancer and other markets as available anchors will grow the range of assets Compound can safely support. In addition, the protocol should develop tooling to support other popular assets such as LP tokens and token derivatives. There are a number of large (by MCAP) assets the protocol could support that the market wants to use as collateral, such as wSTETH, that could significantly increase protocol revenues. Development Work N/A, Sounds great
7 Deploy Compound v2 to L2s and sidechains. Interacting with the protocol is expensive on mainnet and can crowd out users who do not have the scale of capital to justify the gas expenses. Deploying Compound on Polygon, Optimism, and other networks would grow the protocol beyond Ethereum and put competitors at bay. Development Work N/A, Sounds great
8 Transition off Legacy CTokens. The ETH, USDC, ZRX, & BAT markets are all running on a non-upgradable legacy ctoken contract. While WBTC has already migrated, the other markets have not. The protocol is currently missing out on additional revenue by not being able to configure those markets with the improved interest rate model, set a kink in the interest curve for ETH, ZRX, & BAT, and protocol liquidation fee. Generally, this change is easy and only has upside for the protocol. Development Work N/A, Sounds great
9 Interest rate curves. Every interest rate curve utilized is the original interest curve chosen when the cToken was first configured (except DAI, which was updated on July 28th, 2020). This is a critical piece of Compound’s borrow/lend market, and yet the protocol has done little to research alternative curves or test the interest rate curves already utilized. Misc Parameter changes and Management CUT
10 Deprecate old markets. Compound v2 is nearing 1000 days old. The crypto landscape has changed significantly over the last few years, and just as Compound needs to adapt to what participants want today, governance also needs to offload what isn’t required or safe to support. Depreciating REP & SAI, closing down legacy markets, and managing risk on older markets such as BAT & ZRX is important to maintaining the protocol. Misc Parameter changes and Management CUT
11 Update the liquidation system. The efficiency of the close factor and liquidation system as a whole hasn’t been researched meaningfully or iterated upon. As a critical component of the protocol, it needs more dedicated resources. Development Work Provide more info & methodology
12 Upgrade testing and developer code base. While Compound’s codebase and testing was state of the art at its launch, it has since fallen behind. Without a clear, incentivized, and responsible party to improve and maintain the tools, they have become hard to work with and outdated, which has hurt development efforts. Development Work N/A, Sounds great
13 Clean up the existing protocol. The Comptroller needs to be cleaned up and possibly entirely refactored. Similar to the prior point, the codebase was innovative at launch but has since fallen behind without incentivizing someone to improve the system. Development Work N/A, Sounds great
14 Separate revenue generation and risk management. Reserve factors should be optimized to balance protocol revenue and liquidity. Misc Parameter changes and Management CUT
15 Rebalance reserves. The stock of reserves should be adjusted periodically to minimize risk. Compound is not in the business of taking positions and should seek to offload the surplus of volatile assets for stablecoins or even COMP. Misc Parameter changes and Management CUT

We’re looking forward to working with GFX and the greater Compound community to land a scope and move forward here.

Separately, using KPIs to drive a performance bonus sounds like a great way to align costs to the protocol with value delivered to it. However, as @TylerEther and others have pointed out, the proposed bonus structure is not tied to the work GFX is doing any more than it is tied to the overall market recovering. Hopefully by creating a clearer, more focused scope with defined success metrics, another KPI to incentivize success will become an appealing option. The fact that the COMP price is an input to the bonus formula (and the bonus is paid in COMP!) begs the question - how is this bonus structure better at incentive alignment than just paying the team in COMP that vest over a long period of time?

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Intrigued why gauntlet doesn’t think supply caps will be beneficial. Can you please expound?

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Thank you, Paul & Gauntlet, for your comments. We’re glad Gauntlet thinks GFX has been a great contributor and can make a meaningful impact at Compound.

The proposal is purposely flexible in avenues to add value but concise with incentives. The objective isn’t to do any one of the items on the to-do list, but instead to holistically improve the protocol to drive COMP appreciation and higher cash flows. Crypto & DeFi are rapidly evolving environments. We plan to adapt to the protocol’s needs to reach the goals of Compound governance.

As a participant since the early v1 days of Compound, completing the first CAP, and fixing the oracle after the DAI Nov 2020, Getty and GFX Labs has already established a record of value creation at the protocol. If this proposal passes, GFX will become the tip of the spear and push efforts everywhere necessary to re-establish the protocol in a dominant market position.

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It is clear that GFX Labs is a valuable contributor to the Compound Ecosystem and should be paid in accordance with some of the work that is outlined in the above proposal. As a Compound token holder, the largest issue I have with the above proposal is the lack of clear KPIs and commitments from GFX Labs. i.e.

The proposal is purposely flexible in avenues to add value but concise with incentives. The objective isn’t to do any one of the items on the to-do list, but instead to holistically improve the protocol to drive COMP appreciation and higher cash flows

I have never seen a contract (in my traditional line of work) that simply agrees to pay someone $5 million dollars without clear deliverables and KPIs to measure the deliverables against. Price appreciation in the Compound Token is too nebulous to benchmark a proposal against and does not provide the community with an accurate data point to reevaluate future contracts on.

In the vein of DAO work and lack of OKRs, the Maker Community seemingly when through a contentious vote around offboarding a Core Unit, in part because they did not provide KPIs and ways to measure the team’s success against - MIP41c5-SP3: Facilitator Offboarding (MKT-001) - MIPs Archive - The Maker Forum.

DAO governance and contracting are difficult, and I don’t want to make this process onerous to discourage future companies or individuals from proposing similar things as above. However, I believe DAO contracting proposals require a greater degree of granularity around commitments and relevant KPIs than this proposal provides. It is important as community members that we spend the protocol’s money as effectively as possible and are able to analyze service providers’ performance in a quantitative way.

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I like where this is going. I have some follow-up feedback in two areas:

Balancing contributor flexibility and accountability to governance

The recommendations from @pauljlei and @compound101 seem very reasonable to me. At the same time, GFX Labs’ contributions to this point have largely been real-time responses to evolving needs (as opposed to pre-established objectives with associated KPIs), so I can understand the inclination to push back a bit against specific KPIs that may sound sensible today but may not be in the best interest of the protocol 2 or 3 months down the road.

We can likely strike a balance where GFX Labs has some degree of autonomy in prioritizing deliverables while remaining accountable to governance during the streaming period. Even so, I still think that an initial categorization and prioritization of goals, along the lines of @pauljlei 's table, would be a worthwhile exercise for @GFXlabs to engage with and share with us, ideally prior to the passage of of this proposal.

To balance the community’s desire for clarity of objectives and deliverables with GFX Labs’ request for a greater degree of discretion over project management, we might consider establishing a regular schedule for GFX Labs to report on its progress and next steps. For example, we could request a quarterly report and set up a formal community evaluation/comment period at the 6-month mark as an opportunity for governance to provide feedback and request course correction if deemed necessary. The goal here would not be micromanagement, but rather to ensure (likely as it may already be) that GFX Labs is listening and communicating consistently with the developer/user/governance communities as it carries out its work. Provided the community upholds its part to provide that feedback (which admittely can be hard to get when things are going well and nothing’s on fire!), this structure would allow GFX Labs to course-correct and/or defend decisions around goal prioritization before any potential disagreement over the focus or quality of their work would escalate to the point of an offboarding discussion.

Stablecoin payment

On a separate note, I’m still feeling uncertain regarding the state of discussion on stablecoin payments. I believe this would be Compound’s first significant direct expenditure of stablecoin reserves outside of Proposal 59 (DAI liquidation reimbursement) and the first time reserves would be used directly to compensate contributors for their labor.

I think of these reserves as a safety net against small underwater / unprofitable-to-liquidate positions in the protocol, which are miniscule at the moment but likely to grow over time (unless gas prices were to temporarily collapse, I suppose). In this light, doesn’t spending down such a large fraction of reserves increase insolvency risk to the protocol? Won’t it be harder to attract and compensate other contributors when each new agreement creates (what appears to me to be) a superlinear increase to insolvency risk? Should we set a strict lower bound on what fraction of assets we commit to leave untouched in reserves in each market? The principle of whether or not the protocol should pay contributors from stablecoin reserves feels under-discussed to me; perhaps folks with a better handle on the risk management side can refute or corroborate this perspective.

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Great discussion and insightful suggestions to improve transparency and accountability.

However, the root of the problem, as @compound101 has noted, is that “DAO governance and contracting are difficult”. More specifically, it’s the utter lack of vendor and project management disciplines on the part of Compound (perhaps the case with most DAOs) mostly because there’s no centralized entity or leadership to enforce such disciplines.

It’s obvious that GFX Labs is highly regarded by the community. However, it’s hard to fathom that a $5 Million contract would be awarded in the traditional world without extensive documentation (business case and cost justification), clear deliverables, milestones etc. For software development contracts, even Big 3 consulting firms (such as Accenture) provide a clear breakdown of resources that will be used (1 Architect + 3 developers etc.) and their hourly rates. Additionally, most outsourced contracts (whether software development or other services) do not involve profit sharing at all, because it’s not difficult to source services through competitive bidding. Granted certain skills are hard to come by, in that case, a vendor can quote a high hourly rate.

Here’re my thoughts on how to proceed:

Interim solution:

GFX Labs and other similar vendors can provide the following to the community:

  • Projects they want to work on
  • Justification and benefit to the DAO
  • Deliverables
  • Number of resources and hourly rates (by each project)
  • Effort and overall cost estimates and Timeline for delivery (by each project)

Depending on the complexity, Compound can negotiate hourly rates and award projects on an “a la carte” basis.

Long-term solution:

It’s become clear to me during the past few months that lack of vendor and project management disciplines will have an adverse impact on the survivability of the “DAO” model. Being a leader in the DeFi space, it is highly incumbent on the Compound community to consider the legal structure / entity models discussed in this A16Z paper, so that Compound will have a better ability to enter into and manage contracts.

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This proposal oozes chutzpah. At Reverie, we like ambitious proposals by extremely capable individuals and teams. And as everyone who has interacted with @GFXlabs and @getty knows, these guys can walk the walk. There should be little doubt about that.

Before we share our thoughts on @GFXlabs’ proposal, we’d like to be transparent about conflicts of interest. First, Reverie is a small investor in GFX Labs (<2.5%). Second, Getty is a personal friend of mine. Finally, Reverie holds a position in COMP (our exposure to COMP is worth significantly more than our investment in GFX Labs). In short, on paper, there’s a heck of a lot of conflicts of interests. In our opinion however, independence is overrated in matter such as these — when we make decisions, we want to be “dependent” and share in both the upside and also the downside of a decision. To us, a wholly independent opinion is a wispy one.

Now for our thoughts on the proposal.

Measuring Success

  • Having too many KPI’s is not ideal: it gets in the way of focus (groups of people working on complicated projects can only focus on a few core objectives at once) and makes it difficult to focus on the most important things. We think there should be 3-5 KPI’s, tops.

  • In our view, there are three core KPI’s worth focusing on:

    1. Profit growth. Protocol profits is the money left over after the protocol pays all of its expenses, which today, come primarily from COMP-denominated incentives. Profit rather than revenue growth is a more accurate measure of success for a few reasons, with the main one being that it’s more difficult to “juice” profits than revenues. We can look at this by way of a simple example: Compound could very easily juice revenues by paying borrowers and lenders more COMP incentives; although revenue would grow due to an increase in outstanding borrow, profits would fall because the revenue would growth slower than the COMP token-based expenses.

    2. Market share growth. Protocol market share can be calculated in several ways, including borrow-share (Compound’s percentage of all outstanding borrow on DeFi), revenue share (percentage of all money market revenue), and profit share (percentage of all money market profits). We believe all three of these metrics should be actively tracked.

    3. Token price. Over the long run, price follows fundamentals. So if the above KPI’s are doing well, this last KPI should take care of itself.

Compensation

  • There’s a reason why the top employees make significantly more money than average employees: one top employee can contribute 100x more value to an enterprise than an average employee (who can be net negatives to an enterprise). That’s a long way of saying that we see no issue with paying truly exceptional people a lot of money for a job well done.

  • All at once, we’re not in favor of paying people a lot of money before a job well done. In our view, $5M cash is a dazzling amount of money for the protocol to pay over the course of one year. On the cash side, we think the protocol would pay @GFXlabs their labor and resource cost plus something extra on top to make sure they’re motivated by a healthy profit margin. For example, if GFX assigns six employees to Compound and each employee costs the company $250k per year, we believe Compound should be willing to pay 150% of labor cost to GFX, or $2.25M (thereby giving them a profit of $750k and a profit margin of 33%).

  • We think most of @GFXlabs’ compensation should be performance-based and tethered to the aforementioned KPI’s, along with one other requirement: that significant COMP-based upside be granted only if the KPI performance exceeds that of a predefined benchmark. In this case, we think the benchmark should be a basket of competitors/DeFi projects. More specifically, we think GFX Labs should only significant capture upside if their work makes Compound grow KPI’s faster than a basket of competitors. This would make sure the protocol is paying GFX for a job well done rather than paying the them for the job done by a bull market. To use a simplified example of how this could work, we could say GFX Labs gets paid $20M if their work leads to growth in profits, market share, and token price in excess of growth exhibited by Aave, Uniswap, and dYdX. This compensation scheme makes sure that GFX Labs can’t ride on the coattails of a bull market to achieve growth.

We’re lucky to have @GFXlabs and @getty. But we think it’s important to structure things the right way before we rush to pay people life-changing sums of money.

I’ll also mention that it can be tedious to structure compensation over forum posts. If tokenholders are in favor of the proposal but aren’t sure about the compensation, our suggestion would be to form a “Compensation Council” or something of the like with the authority to (i) come up with compensation details and appropriate benchmarks, and (ii) review performance and award a performance-based bonus.

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I think it might be best to assign an importance score or value score to each ticket item and pay bonuses based on those. There could be KPIs for each ticket item, then bonuses could be calculated as KPI * value score == [0, 1] * value score.

This would be very beneficial for one of the most important aspects of software engineering in respect to the longetivity and growth capacity: technical debt.

Addressing technical debt usually doesn’t have immediate payoffs such as profit growth, market share growth, token price increases, etc., but if neglected, technical debt can really drag down a project. After all, the majority of the work spent on a software project over the long term is on maintenance. The easier a project is to maintain, the better.

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@sukernik’s response is very well-reasoned and closely aligns with how we view compensation scenarios like this one.

My takeaway from the broad scope of @GFXlabs’s proposal that this should be viewed less as a decision on “tasks to be done” & how we measure the value of these tasks to the protocol - and more as a decision on “people to be hired” for the general benefit of Compound. To be clear - this means that the proposal should be taken with more weight, not less.

As a general principle, empowering specific individuals with a broad mandate is something that should be minimized as much as possible within any DAO, given the risk of scope creep and social capture over time.

I’d suggest that this proposal add more detail on the resources to be committed - in terms of time, headcount or other applicable metrics - as well as a reasonable process for regular reporting on objectives, workstreams, and output / outcomes. This would help contextualize the base compensation.

On KPI-based compensation, @sukernik’s benchmarking approach is right on point.

Additionally, there should be a clear process for identifying under-performance and off-boarding, with a reasonable time window for @GFXlabs to remediate any issues and for the community to cut the engagment short if the remediation is unsatisfactory. In practice, this may take the form of scheduled polls and evaluations (either community-wide or by a select committee) at pre-defined intervals, where these issues can be raised + a 6-month window for remediation.

our suggestion would be to form a “Compensation Council” or something of the like with the authority to (i) come up with compensation details and appropriate benchmarks, and (ii) review performance and award a performance-based bonus.

This is something we’ve frequently suggested as one of the most high-impact initiatives for the community to kick off. There’s a depth of topics that need to be addressed, including vendor evaluation, RFP development / oversight, and performance measurement.

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I can’t just lurk anymore, because this conversation is following a pattern I see at all the protocols I hang out at. Someone who is a trusted community member comes with a proposal (and maybe it’s not perfect!) and then get told they’re not worth paying. People need a sanity check here.

How can people even say this? Didn’t these folks literally just get one of the biggest DAOs to agree to provide unlimited liquidity to the Dai market? How many tens of millions will that one item save Compound now that there will be a depositor who won’t remove a single coin when liquidity mining is turned off?

See what I wrote above. There’s ways to cut costs that we’re all eager to do cough Comp rewards cough. And look at who just worked at another protocol to bring liquidity that was 1) going to our main competitor for months now, and 2) is managed based on interest rates inclusive of rewards so that the amount Maker provides is actually lower with rewards!

We would be brain dead not to phase out rewards on Dai deposits once this goes live.

In the traditional world, there would be a contract that would protect the contractor, too. Compound lives in a world where Justin Sun can borrow 100,000 Comp, send it to Binance to obscure it, and make some proposal to do god-knows-what to the protocol. What is to stop rando billionaires from cutting off any payment to Gauntlet or OZ or GFX or some other company providing services? There’s no job security here. If we don’t want to pay a lot for services, we need to escrow the money with a third party who can be bound legally not to pull the rug.

Isn’t Gauntlet asking $1.9 million in exchange for just repeatedly saying “allow more leverage” and then collecting a fee based on hypothetical increases in borrowing? Don’t throw stones. Especially when you seem to add risk to other protocols you work on.

So let’s move beyond the question of pay – $5 million base pay is cheap and already paid for by work they did for free before proposing this big giant menu of stuff. This clear KPI thing is the real problem. Let’s get @franklin-pantera and the other VCs to each put a person in a room, lock the door, and let them out when they have a list of 5-10 things they want to see done in the next 12 to 24 months. Slide a pizza under the door if it takes a while.

Think there’s actually an army of people ready to do those KPIs? Do like with auditing and ask for competing bids.

I’m just a humble farmer and don’t know what Compound needs to make token holders like me lots of money, but you gigabrains go figure it out and then tell GFX and Tyler and ar00 and anyone else willing to roll up their sleeves to go do it. There’s a shortage of people willing and able to work here. Stop acting like we can’t pay a premium if anyone comes in here and delivers more than they cost. Know what? It’s not like we can’t kick them to the curb with a simple vote if it’s not working in a couple months.

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Welcome @DefiDegen - fwiw, I think we’re actually saying the same thing. The ask for clear KPI’s is indeed the problem because it’s not directly addressing the point of @GFXlabs’s proposal aka:

The objective isn’t to do any one of the items on the to-do list, but instead to holistically improve the protocol to drive COMP appreciation and higher cash flows.

This isn’t a decision about a project list or a contractor, it’s about elevating the GFX team to the role of a core contributor. It’s clearly stated in the thread title, so @GFXlabs, let me know if I’m off base here.

To be clear, I think this is extremely worth considering. I hope to see many others follow GFX’s path of establishing themselves as credible, high-impact community members and then proposing a sustainable path for the community to bring them onboard in a long-term capacity. That’s why I’m more interested in getting greater precision on the inputs than the outputs.

I also know that Getty & team can take feedback, it would be impossible to function in this environment without tough skin, so I’m not worried about hurt feelings here - especially since I see a thread of mostly constructive & reasonable points here. There’s real ways we can improve this proposal, so that we set a strong blueprint for more people to follow this path.

I also believe that paying a premium for contributions is well worth it in this stage of growth and has long-term benefits in attracting more talent.

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@DefiDegen that’s not how I read any of the responses. It’s a constructive and well-meaning discussion to find the right balance. For example, @sukernik’s example of $250K per year per employee assumes an hourly rate of $125. While that’s just an example, I am sure that community would be open-minded to consider a higher rate for very skilled people, say senior architects. The question here is, how do we keep track of the actual hours dedicated by such a resource to Compound?

Now, @franklin-pantera has pointed out that, perhaps, GFXLabs is intending this as a comprehensive protocol improvement outsourcing deal, and not to be treated on per project basis. This is somewhat akin to a Fortune 500 company outsourcing entire IT operations to a vendor. However, I can guarantee, from close experience, that even such deals are not awarded without extensive documentation, justification, cost estimates, estimates of vendor’s profit margin, and metrics to monitor. Profit sharing arrangements based on the stock price of an outsourcer are almost non-existent.

I can see three models, but first some definitions:

  • Actual cost: Cost based on an estimate of effort involved, Vendor resources, and resources’ actual compensation
  • Profit Margin (Cash): A guaranteed profit if certain base metrics (deliverables related, not protocol performance related) metrics are met.
  • Profit Sharing: Compensation based on protocol performance (earnings, COMP price etc). KPIs discussed by @sukernik are great.

Compensation Models:

  1. Actual cost + Profit Margin (Cash)
  2. Actual cost + Profit Sharing
  3. Actual cost + Profit Margin (Cash) + Profit Sharing

Model 1 easily makes sense. Model 2 requires vendor to have some skin in the game, and they can be nicely rewarded for assuming such risk.

However, Model 3 doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s all reward and no risk to vendors. It can be fine-tuned, but even with a very small Profit Margin(Cash) portion, it practically removes all risk to vendors. I hope Compound doesn’t take this route. If it ends up accepting this model, then it only shows that DAOs (at least, Compound DAO) are not ready for prime time.

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Compound definitely needs to go multichain and I support ending with the rewards the way they are at present

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Hi, I’m new here, but I was curious whether this conversation had any progress lately outside of this thread.

Also, I was curious ask if more stock option-like / equity-like compensation models have been considered.

For example, if the compensation was $2m USDC as the yearly base but then had a $10m COMP component that vests over four years. It would still be significant compensation to @GFXlabs ($2m USDC + $2.5m COMP for the next 12 months), while not being too much stables as concerns raised from @allthecolors, and GFX would have a good balance of covering costs + capturing the upside potential that they seek, no?

There’s a lot of conversation that treats this engagement more like hiring a contractor. In that mental model, all the questions are reasonable: if you’re hiring Accenture for a Salesforce implementation, yes you defined every little detail of the deliverable and Accenture is expected to justify every detail of their cost/invoicing. But it’s my read that the intention of GFX’s proposal here is to hire them as a “full-time” team, being on the same side as the protocol not an outside vender.

When you hire full-time employees at a startup you indeed do not define detailed deliverables. Instead, you define general roles and responsibilities and try to assess whether you would entrust the individual in consideration to make the decisions required in that role and execute. Then you load up a fair amount of equity compensation on top of base salary to align incentives for the long term success of the startup. In that mental model, I feel like what GFX is suggesting here is totally reasonable (detailed enough; there’s already demonstrated trust & demonstration of ability from prior involvement) if indeed thinking of them as a “full-time” long term committed team is their intent and they are willing to receive COMP that vests over time as big chunk of the compensation.

Of course there is a question of whether $10m over four years of COMP is reasonable for the protocol to spend. But relative to $100m a year its spending on rewards, I feel like a $10m COMP spend that vests over four years could be a reasonably high ROI bet to buy the attention commitment from a team like GFX? If anything I feel like the shortage is on GFX caliber non-mercenary teams that the protocol could fund not the other way around.

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