Anybody with 1% of COMP delegated to their address can propose a governance proposal; proposals are simple or complex sets of actions, such as adding support for a new asset, changing an asset’s collateral factor, changing a market’s interest rate model, or changing any other parameter or variable of the protocol. This post is a visual, step-by-step guide on how create a governance proposal via Compound’s Voting Interface. If you’d like to jump ahead straight to the Voting Interface, you can jump ahead here. In addition, for a more technical understanding of what’s happening under the hood, please see our protocol Documentation.
Before we get started, let’s review the requirements to create a governance proposal as of today:
- A web3 wallet
- A delegation amount (votes) in excess of
1%from a single wallet address
Important proposal information:
- If your proposal involves calling a new contract address, that work should be previously completed, and audited before creating a proposal.
- All proposals have a pending period. This acts as a period for votes to set delegations prior to a proposal becoming active, at which point, it can be voted on.
- Only the creator of a proposal can cancel it. This can be canceled up until the execute function has been called on the passed proposal.
- For a detailed view of the states of a proposal, view this diagram.
Step 1 – Navigate to the Compound Interface and Connect your Wallet
- Go to https://app.compound.finance/vote
- When you first visit the interface, a pop-up modal will ask you to connect your Web3 wallet. We recommend using MetaMask, the most popular browser-based Web3 wallet.
Step 2 – Understanding the Compound Voting Interface
- After connecting your wallet, you’ll see the main components of the interface: the Voting Wallet component on the left, Proposals on the right, and your Vote Balance on top.
- The number of votes the connected wallet has is displayed in the center, large, on top of the dark background.
- If you have over
1%of total votes (100,000.00000001) you will see a “Create Proposal” Button that leads to a simple interface to create governance proposals. For the sake of this guide, we will be focusing on this part of the interface.
Step 3 – Click “Create Proposal” to Start
Step 4 – Understand the Create Proposal Interface
- The proposal creation page is broken down into two halves: the Proposal Description and associated Actions.
- Each proposal is required to have a Title , Overview , and at least one Action.
- To add an Action, click the ‘+’ button in the green “add action” bar.
- Once everything is filled out, the “Submit Proposal” button will become active and you can submit your proposal.
- There are many contracts and functions to propose changes to, but for sake of this walk through, we’ll focus on a single type of proposal.
Step 5 – Add an Action to the Proposal
- You may add multiple actions to any proposal , but for the sake of this guide, we’ll only be adding one.
- Because all proposals are executable code , the creation process is simply a selection of pre-defined dropdowns.
- To start, click the ‘+’ button in the green “add action” bar on the right side of the screen.
- The first part of adding an action to a proposal is selecting the targeted contract address for the action. You may select from the contracts used in the Compound Protocol or reference a new one. In this case, we’ll select the cETH contract.
- Based on the chosen contract (cETH), we’ll now need to add a function we wish to change. In this case, we’ll select _setInterestRateModel.
- Based on the chosen function, you may be required to enter additional inputs, in this case, to complete the proposal we need to provide a new interest rate model contract address.
- Once all fields are completed, the “Add Action” button will become active (green) and you can add the action the the proposal.
- You can edit all actions after adding them, but the current interface limits deleting an action. Simply refresh your page to clear the proposal and start fresh.
Step 5 – Add a Title and Overview to your Proposal
- After all actions are added, you’ll need to provide a Title and Overview to describe your proposal. The more clear and concise these inputs are, the better. This is a great place to link audits, blog posts with further analysis or details, etc.
- In the Overview section you can use Markdown to stylize your content.
- Once filled out, the “Submit Proposal” will become active and your proposal is ready to be submitted into the Compound Governance system!
