I’m sad to say GFX Labs and my time at Compound will be coming to a close. It has been a lot of fun to work with everyone on Compound over the last few years. I’ve found great friends and made some great memories.
I joined the protocol back on v1 before Sai was listed. In hindsight, my usage of the protocol was probably a bit reckless as I definitely didn’t know enough about the protocol to use it the way I was at Grapefruit Trading. I remember being totally fascinated with the premise of the protocol.
It truly was the first financial tool I found amazing.
I remember when COMP was introduced and the idea of protocol governance. Up until then, I just sat in Discord. COMP and Governor Alpha allowed me to take an active role in improving the protocol.
It feels like an eternity ago, but back when I proposed 24 to raise the WBTC collateral factor to 60%. I remember it was a huge deal (at least to me). I had managed to get Grapefruit to be the only OTC desk to support WBTC and knew there was a chicken and egg problem for WBTC. A recent Medium post by the Labs team introduced Compound Autonomous Proposals that allowed a token holder with 100 COMP to make a mini-proposal instead of the standard 100k proposal threshold. I bought a 100 COMP and made the mini-proposal. That began my lobbying effort to get people to delegate 100k votes to make it a full-fledged proposal.
When proposal 24 passed, I was amazed that someone with such limited credentials could make such a massive change, and that became my catalyst to continue to work in protocol governance.
In November 2020, the Dai liquidation occurred. After a few months of little action by anyone, I decided to take it upon myself to improve the oracle system to avoid another tragedy from happening again. Everyone hanging out in Compound in early 2021 will remember the oracle improvement was a very long and controversial process, but after 6-months of work, it was implemented in proposal 47. That is when it became clear to me that improving protocols as a community member would eventually become a formal role in DAOs.
In a subsequent proposal, 51, I became the first individual to be paid a regular COMP payment at the protocol level. After 51, I went on to add AAVE, SUSHI, YFI, and MKR to the protocol. I started running regular community calls and supported many more initiates.
The Compound community has always been one of the friendliest groups in DeFi. Robert Leshner is still one of the few founders I know who would sit in Discord and personally answer people’s questions. The community used to be a vibrant and thoughtful group of like-minded individuals. I don’t want to tarnish the great memories of the protocol by talking about the current state of the protocol, so I’ll leave it at thank you…thank you, Compound, the community, and Labs, for what you all did and what you represented to DeFi.
PS: We’ll be proposing UAV v3 once Chainlink finalizes the deployment in the coming week, and the proposal will also end my protocol pay.