A few months ago, @rleshner started asking some fundamental questions about the compound protocol and its underlying economic models.
Reserve Factor Standardization
Many found these issues very perplexing and exciting, but few could come to the drafting board and bring forward a research report on the subject. I believe this is because of the most significant underlying issue. There is no efficient way to reward contributors.
In the past, when a contributor wanted to claim a bounty, they would have to put the grant within the governance proposition itself. Some examples are,
âThe last two calls withdraw from the cSAI reserves about $5000 worth of SAI and sends it to Arr00 as a bounty for organizing and implementing this proposal.â, source
âThe last two actions take 622 Sai (currently valued at $1200) from reserves and transfer them to Arr00 as a bounty for his work on this proposal.â source
â1. Award ourselves a COMP grant (1000 COMP) to offset development and audit costs.â _grantcomp in Action
See, two of these three self-granting instances came from @arr00, a community member who took time out of his days to develop some smart contracts and better our protocol.
This is amazing! An internet friend of ours could take such a risk, to work on something that has no history of financial reward; that is until he started that precedence. But was it that risky? Not to minimize his contribution, arr00 didnât have to act like Compound was a full-time job. He is a freelancer of sorts, one who has received grants and has written smart contracts.
Then why is Arr00 the only individual to grant himself Comp in a proposal? It wasnât always like that.
Publicly speaking, the biggest proposers of governance props were founders and team other entities like Dharma, Gauntlet, Almeda, and BLCK (I will return to that soon). These entities are not financially constrained, similar to students or new potential contributors, with some exceptions. These are VC backed entities with payroll, resources, experience, and knowledge. Besides âtestingâ out _grantcomp, these entities have not publicly granted themselves a âdevelopment fee.â
The larger entities are substantial holders of Comp, itâs no secret. I believe that they deserve it; without these companies and individuals, their support and hard work, DEFI, Compound, and innovation in finance would not be here today.
But at the end of the day, the smaller contributors have not flourished as they should have in DECENTRALIZED finance. In fact, as of September (old data), this paper
has measured COMP token distribution and has computed its GINI, or wealth inequality of COMP, our governance token to being worse than Afghanistan. Wealth Gini
As I stated before, this data is ancient and does not reflect the current efforts to democratize distribution, including delegation, ie. BLCK, CAPâs, or our future grants. It is not like many crypto projects are much better in terms of âequality,â and Compound has been very competent at shifting the balance. Again, this figure is simply the starting point. The founders had to slowly distribute power towards the community, which is precisely part of that process.
So how does BLCK play into this?
Well, he/she has enough Comp delegated to start a proposal, and in the past, a few contributors have âgone throughâ the account to launch a proposal, including ones with self grants. I do not know where blck gets his or her votes, but one thing for sure is that this account significantly speeds up the process for small contributors and benefits all.
Now, this situation, while very innovative, is not ideal ⌠to get a grant or start a project, a contributor mustâŚ
-
Create project/code proposition
-
if not enough Comp to start a CAP or no one with 100k COMP will support youâŚ
-
Reach out to blck / get the COMP to start a CAP
-
âLobbyâ for votes
-
Passed, get your compensation
This process does not cover the difficulty and time of actually working on a proposal, which should be where one spends the majority of their time, not lobbying.
But what does blck think? (or how will I project it?)
âi can only think about scales in my country people here working 1 month for 3-4 COMP valueâ
âin my country regular people work for 8-9 month for that money so itâs just point of view how much is itâ
Not to speak for others, but there seems to be unused (cheaper) labor in other countries, where people need jobs, want to contribute and live with wealth inequality, not ERC-20 inequality. (laugh here).
Now according to the Call to action, the Comptroller is growing at over 500 COMP a day (old number) that,
and I quote from @rleshner
âthat can be used to expand & improve the Compound protocolâ
So two questions
1 How much should be allocated?
2 How do we implement it?
So when it comes to how much, we need to remember where the funds come from. Well, in this passed proposal, (forum) Gauntlet added two functions to the comptroller, _grantcomp and _setContributorCompSpeed. These allow governance to grant COMP and stream COMP to any address. The grant or stream would come from the comptroller address.
Maybe a few months ago, it would have been more evident how much there is to allocate, because recently, with Comptroller Optimizations, and new COMP speeds, the comptroller COMP balance has been âkind of weird.â The Wchanges in COMP balance is calculable, but since the COMP is now manual and distribution speeds are changed, the COMPâs equation at time âtâ is now more difficult to calculate.
New conservative COMP distribution speeds have allowed the rate at which comptroller COMP grows to grow (i.e. (dy/dt) >1). The Comptroller is gaining more Comp than it is losing, consistently.
Below is a Time Series of the COMP balance for the Comptroller, where grant funds come from.
To err on the side of caution, a stream of 1/comp a day (to utilize the new stream function) and a 15k COMP one-time grant (can be renewed annually) would be considered reasonable.
In contrast, this (15,365.24) COMP for the year will leave a snapshot buffer of around 150k COMP for the Comptroller, and the grant stream grows at approximately 0.2% the speed of which the Comptroller does.
So what would this âgrantsâ system look like? Letâs look at some other defi Projects for Comparison.
We have⌠(along with my sarcastic commentary)
- Synthetix has a very well documented application process, but at the moment, SNX is still highly centralized and does not have an on-chain or formal voting process.
-
So UNI has historically been unable to reach quorum except for the grants system. The grants program has clear responsibilities laid out for committee members and a great purpose and methodology system.
-
Problem I find with their program is the members of the committee. They include @rleshner and other excellent defi CEOâs, and members get paid around $400 an hour, but they have yet to meet or sit through grants (as per last time I asked @rleshner
-
Team members are too busy to deal with this stuff, especially stuff thatâs not their platform. I am not sure if they were asked about it before, but this seems like a ceremonial position, which is inefficient.
-
No offense to these CEOâs, but if the grants program is meant for small international contributors, then the UNI committee is not demographically and socioeconomically diverse compared to those applying. Grant committee work is work. Itâs tedious, complicated, time-consuming, and mentally draining, and most importantly @rleshner is not our Compound Czar.
-
Similar Problem, heavy hitters, grant committee, with Charlie, Andre, and some others. They have yet to get through with feedback or fill grants.
-
Again, these individuals already have a crazy amount of voting power on Curve, and they are in charge of the grants committee, yet the harvest has not been made, and little progress has come from the little guy.
- So balancer took a different path; these grants are for DAOs and companies. AAVE, PIEDAO, ZAPPERFI all got hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and integrate into balancer.
1.This approach is very business-focused, and while it does make sense, balancer is far from decentralized, and its grants do not directly help the contributor we are trying to reach.
-
Very similar to balancer, but a little closer to the DAO side, Flashboys, aavewatch, collateral swap have all been recipients of grantsâŚ
-
They bring quality integration similar to Comp.Vote and are closer to helping the average contributor
An aggregated pros cons list of the comparable grant committees
Cons
-
Poor Choice of Committee Members
-
Helping out DAOs and Companies more than the Individuals
*Little transparency on the approval process
Pros
*Clear Guidelines for applications
*Clear Committee responsibilities
So what can we learn from their successes and failures?
How can we implement them?
-
Clear Guidelines for applications (fork SNX)
-
Clear Committee responsibilities (fork UNI)
-
UTILIZE SNAPSHOT VOTING
-
Seriously, Having every step of the way on Snapshot is the best thing for democracy.
For example, look how cUNI Snapshot is handled; it is beautiful.
We also tried out a Snapshot.voting test to see what compensation for Comp.vote should look like. Just imagine what the community would be like if everyone got compensated for the work we did.
For example, take a look at these uncompensated mini projects the community has done, like DAI Liquidation Report, Oracle Solution, WBTC CFactor, and COMP distribution speeds research.
While these projects should be compensated retroactively, we can vote on that later if someone proposes it as a project.
I suggest you take a look at what I have created on GitHub regarding how Snapshot will be integrated with this multisig grants committee.
Large Comp Holders: Delegate some Comp to committee members you like, vote in them, be active, please!
Donât be a
If you have ideas, criticism, want to serve your community, please comment, pm me on discord.
@massnomis7291